The Silent Decline of Google’s Search Quality

If we take a step back from 2025 and return to roughly a decade ago, search results on Google were far more precise, direct, and aligned with what we were looking for. Back then, the search engine truly felt like a tool for accessing knowledge. Now, it’s disheartening to see how much that experience has deteriorated.

We could spend hours dissecting the reasons for this shift — the “Dead Internet Theory,” the explosion of AI-generated content, increasingly aggressive ad algorithms, and relentless SEO manipulation. But the conclusion is simple: the quality of search results has dropped dramatically.

For someone like me, who primarily searches in Turkish, the change is even more striking. Around ten years ago, a search for “cybersecurity” would lead me to high-quality forums, detailed technical documentation, and blogs run by genuinely skilled individuals in the field. More often than not, the content was detailed enough to directly solve the problem at hand.

Today, searching for the same terms mostly brings up pages dressed in the aesthetic trends and SEO patterns of 2025, yet stripped of any real technical depth. Worse still, a basic pentesting query like “how to do SQL injection” now leads almost exclusively to corporate, white-hat platforms such as PortSwigger, Acunetix, or Avast. These resources can be useful, yes, but where did the old underground forum culture, the independent researcher blogs, and the original technical write-ups disappear to? When did the spirit of “knowledge sharing” get replaced by marketing landing pages?

This isn’t an issue limited to cybersecurity. Software development, hardware reviews, even system administration — all of these areas have suffered as Google’s algorithm has shifted in recent years, eroding the user experience. Sponsored posts, affiliate-link farms, and shallow AI-written articles dominate the results.

Yes, many people now turn to AI for answers or use social media to research specific topics. But this doesn’t reverse the decline in online information quality — if anything, it makes truly valuable technical knowledge harder to find.

The internet becoming a vast landfill, with the good content buried under mountains of digital debris, is not just a nostalgic loss; it’s a serious problem for the freedom to access knowledge. The information might still be out there somewhere, but compared to the past, you now have to dig far deeper to reach it.