Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.
That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks.
Could I tender: "uBlacklist" as a stop gap, amongst others as we await Google being given a right old kicking?
Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be CnP clones of someone's blog but a human is able to get in reasonably quickly. I'm toying with blocking Stackoverflow and other cough slatwarts to see if results get better for me.
In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it works really well.)
I still won't use words like cesspool for this but I am increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that's fine) at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be able to turn all that stuff off.
I understand that Google are trying to "be" the internet to try and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant.
Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move again if I feel I have to. Of course that's not much in the grand scheme of things and I'll probably only take around 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably not a big deal.
It's hard for me to pick a sweet spot for the internet in many ways I feel like I've grown up with it.
I can remember the web of circa 1995 to 1997 with Gif's that wouldn't render properly in internet explorer, HTML marquee scrolling text and the dreaded blink tag being used everywhere. You needed to play search engine bingo with Altavista, Metacrawler, Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos etc etc. And it was a crap shoot if search engines would give you useful results.
I can remember the web of 1998 to 2000 where every web developer seemed to discover html frames at the same time. We had good search with Google but pop up ads were so rife that the internet was borderline unusable. I can remember all the free webmail sites like hotmail, yahoo etc. ICQ chat was massive (whatever happened to that - it was a staple of my teen internet).
In Early 2000's Firefox came along and saved the internet by virtue of its built in popup blocking. But there was a mishmap of "Applets" and "Plugins" everywhere Flash Player, Java Applets, Real Player etc. Video (and audio) on the web was terrible half the time it would complain about missing codecs, it would buffer forever and if something did load it would be the size of a postage stamp and look pixelated as all hell. I remember Gmail came out and everyone went gaga over it's interface.
Last period that real stands out is the mid to late 00's with development of big Social Media sites, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. The web got more and more javascript heavy. Web video streaming finally became useable. Google Chrome came out and flash player finally died despite Microsoft trying to revive it with Silverlight.
I kind of feel like this last 10 years are a continuation with increased surveillance and tracking.