Is there any truth to my suspicion that the web of hyperlinks (on which the famed algorithm relied) is significantly weaker and reaches fewer corners these days?
Certainly feels like content is migrating to the walled gardens and there are fewer and fewer personal websites injecting edges into the open graph.
Last November I speculated why Google would let HTTP/2 get standardized without specifying the use of SRV records:
“This is going to bite them big time in the end, because Google got large by indexing the Geocities-style web, where everybody did have their own web page on a very distributed set of web hosts. What Google is doing is only contributing to the centralization of the Web, the conversion of the Web into Facebook, which will, in turn, kill Google, since they then will have nothing to index.
They sort of saw this coming, but their idea of a fix was Google+ – trying to make sure that they were the ones on top. I think they are still hoping for this, which is why they won’t allow a decentralized web by using SRV records in HTTP/2.”
It feels the same way to me. To a large percent of users the internet is Facebook rather than the largest compendium of human knowledge in existence, but lucky for us that use it for the latter reason that value of such a thing will always be evident.
But then, so has the www that the original Google worked so well for.
I suspect original Google would be horrible on today's web.
I miss 1998 and I mourn for what could have been.