[dmschulman]

I would have to agree that it's a little of column A and a little of column B. Though there are always little known pockets of gold that exist on the internet (hard to come by through normal means but instantly useful the moment you find them), I think that the quality hasn't declined so much as the amount of noise out there has increased.

A lot of the noise relates to stuff people find socially relevant (celebrity news, people blogging about food, mom forums, whatever other mind junk food you can think of), there is a huge increase in all of this kind of material. The flip side that the real intellectual/technical gems of material are being outpaced by the other types of content out there.

Also Google's drastically changed the way search works over the last few years (some might argue decade). The "organicness" has kind of been drained from search and has instead been replaced with Google's idea of convenience. The amount of chance and "freshness" in your results has been replaced by, not only SEO oriented content, but also by Google's expectations of what they think you wanted to find (a wikipedia article, an IMDB entry, a Google places listing). It works for some concrete stuff, but on the whole I think it's done a disservice to the core of what makes "the internet" the internet.