It happens again. For me, Google gives now search results from forums and blog from about 10-15 years ago, and low to average quality answers at best. It doesn't return some 15 years ago material because of its stellar quality, not at all.
Often I'm searching EEVblog with google, by adding site:eevblog.com at the end of the search. Doesn't work any more, not broken just that it returns irrelevant results.
Yesterday I've clicked on YouTube from a live USB Linux installer (so no login and no browsing history), and I've been loathed from what I've seen in the YouTube main page. Looking at the titles and thumbnails was enough to tell all suggestions from YouTube were absolute garbage.
Then I thought, maybe I've lived for too long under a rock without looking outside. Maybe that's how pop culture looks like these days. So I've search "science" in the youtube bar, and no, still trash suggestions of videos with slightly "sciency" related titles, but in fact focused on hype and superficiality, more like the clickbait kind of science.
First page of YouTube is looking just like the wall of fame in an idiots asylum would probably look like.
And I've scrolled a lot, for about 10-20 pages, it was all the same. My conclusion so far: The main YouTube page is filled with trash not because that is what pop culture looks like, or because that's what the average Joe likes to watch, no. I think the main YouTube page is filled with trash because that is what YouTube is promoting, and what YouTube is pushing to its viewers.
I wouldn't rant about YT if it weren't for the long term implication I'm afraid will follow this. Pushing trash into people's mind can only spiral us down. It almost looks like the "algorithm" is educating the whole world to become the people from the Idiocracy (2006) movie.
By each year, this movie turns more and more into a new genre: Prophetic Documentary.
The problem with natural selection is that it has no goals, it is only driven by environment and luck.
The environment is the one who choose who's to thrive, and who's to die. So far the Earth and its biosphere were our environment, the filter that made us what we are today, but now we are at the point where we create and shape our own environment, which environment in return shapes us. Maybe we should put some goals into it.
That's a circular dependency there, a feedback loop, and that can go horribly wrong if we don't pay attention to it.
So far it seems the loop oscillates. Saying this because history tells about periods of alternating good times and bad times. It is not the forest any more who shapes humans. It's the other humans. We are living by social rules, not by nature's rules. The asphalt jungle is our forest v2.0, now with Internet and VR headsets.
TL;DR I hope the search results in Google right now are from 10+ years ago only because Google is re-indexing to prioritize quality over popularity.