I think it's rather sad what Google has become; in an attempt to make search "more human", they have also quite successfully replicated all the disadvantages of asking a not-so-intelligent human to find what you're looking for, complete with second-guessing and subtly modifying your queries as well as not showing everything that does match. I am not completely convinced there is an ulterior motive behind it, but it could certainly be one way of controlling what the population thinks or even the language: if all searches for foo are silently redirected to fob or a similar but actually different thing, then it reduces the ability to discover --- and subsequently propagate --- information about foo.

Near the turn of the century(!), I remember hearing that the Internet was one of the places you could find information on very obscure/fringe subjects, and for a while that was actually true; but now it seems that search engines are gradually cutting off that fringe in optimising for the popular and mainstream.

I also noticed Google's search results took a nosedive in quality (~2010) not long after Fravia passed away --- I doubt there's any correlation there, but that felt a little surprising to me.