Folks on HN have postulated that the reason Google search results are so terrible these days may have something to do with content being terrible. A garbage-in garbage-out problem. Maybe this lack of friend links is contributing.
"It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of [sci fi] is crud. The Revelation:
Ninety percent of everything is crud."
As the amount of content on the internet grows dramatically, that 90% appears much larger. The problem of finding the good 10% does not scale proportionately.
Therefore, I fully believe the ratio of good:bad content remains the same as it ever was (~1:9), but sifting through the "crud" is much harder and will continue to grow harder. Perhaps exponentially.
I think most blogging drifted towards affiliate marketing and as a result, Google drastically devalued that content (for that and other reasons).
As a result, I find it so hard to find genuine experiences through web search now. It's all just USAToday, CNN, NYTimes, Webmd, etc. media sites (which are themselves mostly just affiliate marketing/advertising plays, so maybe that wasn't Google's motivation).
I miss the days of searching the web and finding content written by real humans.
The only search I find that satisfies this consistently is Reddit (especially searching google with site:reddit.com)
