Yeah, these sort-of-but-not-really-content sites have really increased the cognitive load of using the internet. Of course, internet content was always of variable quality, but up until the late 1990s, maybe early 2000s, most random pages on some subject were written by someone who actually had some sort of interest in it. Given a geocities page on some random subject, it might well be crazy, but it was usually in good faith: the person really was saying it in their own voice, because they wanted to, not because they were being paid some pennies per paragraph to write it.

The rise of a few specific sites with decent, non-spammy info is the only thing that's really saved its usefulness for me. Wikipedia alone accounts for a huge proportion of the times when a Google result is actually a good one. And for travel information, I go directly to a few sites (mainly Wikitravel) and don't even bother with Google.