[II2II]

Is it the quality of the web that has been declining, or is our ability to find quality information on the web (due to Google and friends) affecting our perception of the web?

I'm on the fence on this.

Contributors and commenters on HN manage to surface many interesting sites that would be difficult to find using a modern search engine. There is also a large number of old sites that have continued to exist, even if they are otherwise unmaintained, which are also difficult to find using a modern search engine. On the other hand, these sites may be less common than they used to be.

Likewise, scraped and pasted websites are nothing new. It has always been a relatively low effort way to post content. What seems to be new is how often nearly identical pages appear in the top search results. This could be because it is more common, but it may also be because the algorithms are favouring very particular types of content.