This happened because a few corporations were able to capture most of the internet due to a mix of laziness on the part of users and also the death of independent blogs and fan sites.

I suspect that the independent internet died for pretty much the same reason why many people won't post anything interesting or authentic on social media anymore: Being active online can lead indirectly to real world harm to yourself or your family. Evil people use the internet to harass other people and to attack their livelihood or put the safety of their family at risk. Many employers now discriminate against employees or even just people applying for jobs who openly express opinions on the internet. And even posting pseudonymously isn't completely safe because it is usually possible to deanonymize posters if an attacker is obsessed enough.

The sad reality is that many people do inauthentic things for the sake of career advancement (think of all the college students who do extracurriculars or projects for the sole purpose of "resume padding") and refuse to do things they actually believe in for the sake of their career. When creating quality online content becomes a risk to career advancement, people are going to stop doing it. In the long term, that means a siloed internet full of corporate propaganda, SEO optimized blogspam and clearly inauthentic posts.

In short, I believe Google search is getting worse because the internet is getting worse. And the internet is getting worse because our society permits employers to have a chilling effect on the online speech of their employees and those who might be their employees someday. And because the independent internet has shrunk dramatically, the handful of corporations that control almost the entire internet can now get away with siloing it off so that's what they're doing.

I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction in Google Search efficacy was when they introduced Instant Search (or whatever they called the feature that presented results as users typed, rather than waiting for users to submit a full query). Even when they got rid of it, they never backtracked on whatever back-end changes enabled it (and degraded results in the service of presenting them faster).

My suspicion is that this was the beginning of the public presentation of corporate infighting, where what the public saw from Google began to be less about good products and more about the products that particular execs, managers, and developers needed to "win" in order to bolster their careers (or what they perceive as such). This is why Google has developed a reputation for killing useful products, often replacing them with flashier and more frustrating alternatives (if at all).

I don't like putting this on external factors. I think Google is doing this to themselves. It's a more private and stretched-out version of what's happening very publicly with Twitter right now.

that makes a lotta sense even to my ignorant mind. so everyone got login'd prompted since companies make the most money data gatherin or what have you, plus reducing bots, stuff like that, it all makes individual sense and then amounts to search engines not working good anymore. Plus real blogs or websites with real human writing get buried or never shown because of bot or that SEO thing I tried to understand?

I'm just trying to wrap my head around it but I think I'm making sense of it now and it's kinda like that race to the bottom I see sometimes mentioned here? Do I got it right?

It’s easy to be mad at Facebook, newspapers, Pinterest, Discord, etc. for locking the internet away behind a login or paywall. But it’s also the result of Google capturing all the value from the free internet.

The end result is companies trying to capture more of that value for themselves and not letting Google eat their lunch, which required moving content and communities behind closed doors.