Search can no longer be relied upon to return standard results. Using the book index as a synonym, when you pick up a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, you know that the index is the same as it was when the book was printed. It's not been secretly updated based how many people looked up each section in that volume globally. You know that if you are the first ever person to look up Early Chinese Pottery that if the entry isn't indexed, then it's not in that volume, and it's not because the index decided that it wasn't a popular enough topic and removed it from the index. I know Google don't actually remove non-popular items from their indexes, they just bury them behind results pages of more popular 'relevant' results. To the lay person, the result they are looking for may as well be removed.

I appreciate that Google and Bing spend millions of dollars trying to purge their indexes of spam, but they also seem to spend millions of dollars creating adaptive results based on an unknown list of parameters and variables that are opaque even to the search organisations themselves.

It's time a new search player stepped up with a proper mature indexing concept that allows for deep hierarchical filter searching based on a semi-static system that only removes results from search when they actually go offline, and doesn't prioritise social media posts above everything else.

We need to bring the internet back to the primary function of an information resource first and foremost. The clickbait-ad-selling junkie that it has become is creating a closed circle of idiotic users consuming and creating yet more idiotic content, like a fish eating its own tail. What's more, Google and Bing are the primary enablers of this whole problem.

I don't know how to fix it, but somebody has to do something before the internet becomes nothing more than an ad-ridden gogglebox in the same way television has already become.