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@bot @RustyCrab @a7 People forget how long Google has been around. There was a point where Google was competing with then-giant Yahoo, and Yahoo had individual people rating and categorizing every web page submitted to the index. The Internet really was small when Google made their Pagelink algorithm. Search results started degrading in the mid-2010s from what I saw. It seemed like the old index disappeared; there's some sites I KNOW were indexed since the late 90s that wouldn't be returned any more. Then they ditched the old version of the cache. Around the same time you saw the articles about the massive, expensive data centers Google was running. The Web had exploded, the Great Recession had hit their revenues, and even though they were still profitable they were clearly feeling the operating costs. Add in the politically-motivated censorship they put in place since roughly 2018, and the "trusted sources" bullshit they pulled in 2020, and you get a smaller subset of the web it's willing to search. I think they were so ready to do those things because they were already doing it to cut costs. The political motivation was just gravy.

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