I think there was plenty of junk in the "small sites" world when it came to affiliates that deserved algorithmic modification, but Google absolutely took a sledgehammer to that side of the industry killing small players over the last six months. Now the big content sites that invest in search-volume-heavy terms are feasting on the traffic (and affiliate payouts).

But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again, hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce filtering they already show on a lot of terms).

I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had.

The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.