1. I am not discrediting the expert in any way, if anything, I think their decision to quit is understandable - there is now a challenge that arose during his research that is not in their interest to pursue (information pollution is not research in corpus linguistics / NLP).

2. I never said that things are the same as ever, quite the opposite actually. I am saying the world evolves constantly. It's naive to say company X/Y/Z killed something or made something unusable, when there is constant inevitable change. We should focus on how to move forward giving this constraint, and not dwell on times where the web was so much 'cleaner' and 'nicer', more manageable etc.