Google has definitely just plain delisted a lot of older sites, even if I do exact quote matches I can’t get results for sites I know exist and used to be indexed and often turn up on other search engines.

On top of that, as you say, anything that isn’t from a huge web property or corporate site is so heavily penalized you’re lucky to ever see it even if it is new.

The utility of google as a web search engine is definitely declining over time.

This is possibly a self-destructive pattern, too. Once nobody can find anything outside of Quora/Wikipedia/Pinterest/Stackoverflow etc. why would anyone bother creating small sites/blogs (this has been happening already for a decade) — But then, once the entire accessible web is just these handful of big sites, what is Google’s utility? They all have internal search and are increasingly accessed primarily through apps

Like grocery stores or many types of restaurants, for example. They usually can't compete against the Walmarts and Paneras, which suck up consumer mindshare. Similar with soft drinks. Coke and Pepsi build as much mindshare as possible. You may invent a great product, but it likely will never get noticed among corporate noise.

Google, Wikipedia, Facebook are becoming the default go-to spots for particular activities, similar to what McDonald's did to fast dining in the 60s and 70s. I guess, in general, markets saturate, oligopolize, and the small spots fade away unless they're niche or very high quality.

It's even delisting a lot of content from existing sites. For example, I've got previous HN comments that I used to reference using `akiselev site:ycombinator.com [some key words]` that are nowhere to be found now. I started noticing this a few years ago.

So much that it could disappear and we would be able to move on. Hard to say that a few years ago.

>Google has definitely just plain delisted a lot of older sites

This really sucks. What are the alternatives?