I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I've come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to blame. It's just that there isn't any good quality information on the web anymore. Google does its best, but it's working with crappy data. No one wants to spend time and effort making a great website about <insert literally any topic here> unless they're in it for the money. That means Google will only ever return blogspam, affiliate websites, and SEO-optimized ecommerce websites for practically any search now. This is in contrast to the good old days when people made websites for fun and searches actually found the high quality content that was out there. These days searches don't find quality content because, on the whole, it doesn't exist.

This isn't universally true of course. There is some good content. But it's never what you're searching for; it's only good when you stumble across it, or you find a link on HN/Reddit/etc. It's just interesting rather than specifically good or useful.

To an extent Google is to blame because AdSense and DoubleClick drove the shift from people publishing what they love to people publishing for dollars, but, and this is somewhat cynical I know, I genuinely wonder if we're actually on the brink of realising the web as a publishing platform just isn't that great.