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Search is a battleground. There are huge amounts of money to be made from "worsening" your search results by steering them to inferior products. So search engines and blackhat SEO are locked in a permanent struggle.

Or, some public database of the crawled web where we can apply our own algorithm.

I've always dreamed of a grep for the web, for instance. Trying to Google for code is a pain, even when quoted/verbatim.

This exists: commoncrawl.org

That’s because the web is dead. Lots of passion projects that would have been on a blog or websites are locked into Facebook or even Twitter threads.

My local historical society decided to produce lots of content and exclusively post to Facebook. It’s incredibly dumb, but people seek the easiest path.

This is a good point, the internet is largely monopolized

Yes. Don't hate the player, hate the game. If the visibility of your work is determined by it's "freshness", then freshening up makes sense. If everyone does this, then Google et al will have to find a better criterion to rank by.