Part of the problem is a huge part of that "content" is ultra SEO'd low quality copy pasted crap crammed with ads, specifically designed to harvest clicks from Google, and little else.

The best open source mailing list archive is unquestionably https://marc.info . yet when you search things that are open source relevant, you get https://nabble.com which goes as far as to fake being a forum and fills content from mailing lists, is nearly useless feature wise, and is crammed with all sorts of nasty obnoxious advertising.

marc.info doesn't even crack page 10 with typical queries, because they don't play the SEO optimization game, and doesn't run ads.

This is a great example of Google becoming totally useless.

The last time I remember this being mentioned on HN, a few days later marc.info was at the top of search results for mailing list type posts, but it seems whatever manual tweak they applied has since been invalidated by the Googletron...

Yes it is harder because of the death of the + operator and the insistence on aggressive stemming and autocorrecting that applies even when you “really” “mean” “what” “you” “say”.

Interesting that the + operator doesn't work but the - operator still works just fine.

I don't know how many times I've had to add -nodejs to things I'm trying to search to eliminate irrelevant garbage from some of my searches.

They removed the + operator because they wanted people to be able to search "G+", "Google+" and "Google +" in addition to Google Plus. Interesting that they haven't reverted it yet, though, considering that Google Plus is now utterly defunct.

You can just put the single word in quotes. As far as I can tell, it works the same way as the + used to.

It is harder because of both, and the fact that so much of the more content is lower quality. In the past it was not just that you could build up an understanding of a subject but often that understanding came from high quality experts on the subject. Nowadays the understanding of a subject you can build up often comes from a content mill or something providing a lower quality overview of the subject.

Searches you do now on basically any subject you are not an expert in already give you the same subject matter level of expertise you can expect from a 5 minute segment on the nightly news, whereas before you could expect at least the quality of a 30 minute show hosted by James Burke.

Both? Google helped shape the internet by connecting customers to businesses. The internet helped shape Google because it’s Google’s primary data source.