Do you think it's because of search or SEO pumped content? Maybe both?
If I don't do this, I usually don't get what I'm looking for. Instead, I'm overwhelmed by low-quality self-branding content on Medium, dev.to, towardsdatascience, Quora, etc. There are too many of these now.
Overall, my search has shifted to largely social sites, especially semi-anonymous ones like HN/reddit. The upvoted content (and comments) I find there tends to be miles better than anything Google surfaces on their first page. This has definitely changed over the recent years, it used to not be like this.
I am only talking about content by the way, I still find what I am looking for if I am searching something else
A week or so ago I noticed I've begun to adapt to this poor state of search results by almost immediately navigating to the second "page" and beyond. Not all that long ago, searching beyond the "first page" was almost taboo. Nowadays it's become the norm for me.
Web search via search engines is filled with low quality content, rehashed stuff from mainstream media outlets and bad attempts at trying to 'guess' what the user wants rather than showing them what they're actually looking for.
And on site search makes Google search look like perfection by comparison. Trying to search a social media site, internet forum, blog or wiki is often a complete nightmare, and gets you nothing close to what you actually want to find. If your ideal page doesn't come up via auto suggest, then trying to find it is probably going to be a miserable experience.