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Quality has gone down. Some of it due to “freshness” bias. Some due to content farms. And now we have more explicit search results squelching.

I used to have some favorite sites with different things, some recipes, some other technical things. I can’t surface those results anymore. They are buried by all sorts of uninteresting results.

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There is also other reason. More and more new content is not visible for web search engines - for instance groups on social media like facebook or linkedin. Very often the results for a very specific query are pages from some forums or discussion boards. Since more and more discussions are taking place in one or other walled garden, more and more relevant content will not be accessible through independent search engines. I'm afraid that in the future larger and larger fraction of content will be fragmented and the ability to use a single search engine to find everything will become a thing of the past.

I believe the bolt on ML algorithms like Vince, Panda, and Penguin add up to something like "prefer a well linked brand site over anything else".

The Vince update is interesting. Google characterized it as being about trust: https://searchengineland.com/google-searchs-vince-change-goo...

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