So from a business point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google indexing everything, no matter how old and how obscure.
I don't get that line of thought, somehow people have starting defend lack of quality as something expected or reasonable.
The whole point of going to google is to find stuff, that includes "boring" old and obscure stuff that won't sell ads. But that is part of the deal, if google don't care about that why should I care about google?
While we are on the subject, I still miss being able add a + in front of a word to highlight its significance, this was removed in favor of google+ (you can still do it with quotes) but now when google+ has been irrelevant for the better part of a decade maybe it is time let us quickly emphasis words? Sigh.
Google's job is to make money, and to grow and make ever increasing amounts of money, not to find stuff. If Google decides that it's worth it to lose some of its customers in order to reduce costs, then it's fair game for them to do so.
Maybe a competitor will come in and steal marketshare from Google by filling the hole Google leaves behind when they increasingly make changes which annoy a subset of users (duckduckgo is probably closest, and I use it as my default search engine, but I don't find it's as good as Google yet in a lot of cases). Maybe enough people will switch to be an issue for Google, in which case Google miscalculated the cost of pissing of that subset of its userbase. Maybe so few people will switch that it's offset by the cost savings of not keeping everything indexed, in which case it might've been the correct decision, from a capitalistic point of view.
This focus on constant growth is the issue with relying on companies and capitalism, but that's a bigger discussion.
What makes you believe this is a rational decision? Even if you reduce everything to "must make money"?
This hasn't anything to do with capitalism. It is pure greed. Companies willingly do anything for a slight increase in revenue even if they willingly acknowledge that it will cost them ten times as much in the (not so) long term.
There is nothing about capitalism that says you must be a colossal idiot, that's just a consequence of a poisonous culture where employees don't give a crap about the company but only focus on their own career.
I don't get that line of thought, somehow people have starting defend lack of quality as something expected or reasonable.
The whole point of going to google is to find stuff, that includes "boring" old and obscure stuff that won't sell ads. But that is part of the deal, if google don't care about that why should I care about google?
While we are on the subject, I still miss being able add a + in front of a word to highlight its significance, this was removed in favor of google+ (you can still do it with quotes) but now when google+ has been irrelevant for the better part of a decade maybe it is time let us quickly emphasis words? Sigh.