[janalsncm]

There are two possibilities:

1. Search engines are getting less good at ranking bad content below good content

2. The good content is getting worse. So bad, in fact, that it looks like bad content.

It may be a little of both. I lean towards 2, though. It’s kind of a race to the bottom in terms of jamming your page with ads, buzz words, and popups these days.

Generally speaking, the web doesn’t have great results for e.g. product recommendations. Part of it is because of how centralized the internet has become.

The best you can do a lot of the time is to just serve mostly Reddit results. But even that can be gamed.

[willhinsa]

the PROPORTION of content is getting worse

but GREAT content on an absolute numbers level is rising every single year

excepting the death of good content through attrition and entropy good content only goes up unless we're all dead

it's just discovering good new content is difficult, especially when you're a sclerotic barnacle tied to legacy interests of all stripes!

[janalsncm]

> the PROPORTION of content is getting worse but GREAT content on an absolute numbers level is rising every single year

I’d love to believe this is true, but it can’t be true for every query. How much great content is out there for best gaming laptop or marinara sauce recipe?

Tech gadget review sites are filled to the brim with ads and paid links these days, without exception.

Recipe websites are also filled with ads, facilitated by long descriptions of unnecessary family history to create more vertical space.

> discovering new content is difficult

Indeed, great new content is almost impossible. There are blog search engines which do a decent job. Trouble is, those won’t cover all my queries.

> sclerotic barnacle

Solid vocab choice. Respect.