The real answer to this question is that walled-garden social media took over everything. The much-pined-for "Old Google" worked because people used to actually create content on their own sites, and not just post it on walled garden monolithic social sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Google released several updates (such as "Panda") that greatly lowers the rank of domains that aren't linked to by major domains they deem to be trusted, such as those with edu or gov TLDs or whatever whitelist of domains they decided to add. There have also been updates that specifically lowers the rank of websites that are running forum or blog software. This was probably done to fight spammers but it has effectively killed off the long tail of topics.
This is admittedly speculation since the inner workings of Google search are not released to the public. But these findings have been corroborated by others on the internet.
I used to have a blog and several forums that used to rank highly for some niche keywords and over the years the search rankings started to drop off the front page while a single reddit comment with no content mentioning the same keywords would be #1.
I'd say that Google is very much to blame for this situation as they took the easy way out to fight spammers.
No, no, Eric Schmidt openly said that "Brands is how you sort out the 'mess'" (in search). And he started prioritizing big brands in search results and disappearing everyone else.
Panda even wiped out individual webmasters or small software houses - they were adding small back links to the websites that they built for their clients, per google's OWN recommendations, for years.
Then google turned around and suddenly penalized all of those legitimate links while 'sorting out the spam'. millions of small businesses, developers, software houses found themselves with zero traffic within a day. their hard earned traffic coming from legitimate business clients. whose sites were also affected similarly.
This caused the rise in internet marketplaces. from amazon to elance, upwork. because the small businesses and individuals were now totally invisible in search results and instead 'brands' dominated. a side effect was killing of independent content in search results and forcing everyone to have to post in social networks for visibility, forcing content creators out of their own blogs into social networks. Which exacerbated the damages that algorithms because now everyone had to obey individual corporations' unaccountable algorithms.
So yes, google has created this mess to a very large degree. Their nonchalant, uncaring attitude towards their users, customers that plagues all of their products crippled search as well. By saying "Brands is how you sort out the mess" and enforcing it top-down, one single ceo single handedly decided the fate of millions of small businesses, blogs, professionals. In a totally unaccountable way with no input from anyone affected.
Speaking to a group of magazine executives at the Google headquarters, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday that the Internet is becoming a breeding ground for false information, reports Ad age. But trusted brands help weed through the disinformation:
"Brands are the solution, not the problem... Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."
https://battellemedia.com/archives/2008/10/cesspool_brands_e...
"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired….It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component."
I've had very little problems cutting through the SEO spam running an independent search engine, but then I don't shape traffic like they do.
I love GraphQL, and I think it has a number of features that make it better and more usable for most APIs than a RESTful interface.
The thing I despise about GraphQL is they put "QL" in the name, so legions of software developers think that it is somehow comparable to SQL, or somehow is a generic query language for data.
GraphQL has absolutely nothing to do with SQL. Comparing "GraphQL vs SQL" is like comparing "HTML vs Java".
In what sense is GraphQL not a generic query language for data?
Those are all the right analogies for comparing GraphQL. GraphQL doesn't say anything about how the underlying data is queried - at the end of the day it's just a bunch of resolver functions that you can implement however you want.
I'm sure it's not Google's intention to ruin the web, it's just something they happily accept as a by-product of their optimization strategy towards maximum value extraction via ads. Like some chicken farmers happily accepting creating chicken hell because it lowers cost. I don't think they set out to torture chickens and go "hey, I'll start a chicken farm as a cover story".
Just as in nature, monoculture rewards specialization, whereas ecological diversity rewards generalization. Not that specialization doesn't exist in diverse ecosystems, it's just not as devastating.
But they didn’t want to do that anymore. Why? Because of ads money.
To drive the point home, it is not that difficult for Google to have a junk score and simply phase out the junkiest of junks. But they didn’t even want to do that.