I mean, forgive me for thinking that "chicken" is actually a term referring to live birds. Instead, humanity's view is clearly very distorted by our stomachs.
One does not use the internet for facts. One uses the internet to be directed towards where to spend their money and/or time as sold to the highest bidder, who is just looking to line their pockets with money--a digital sugar rush for digital stomachs. The internet doesn't think with its brain, it doesn't tell you what you want to know, it thinks with its stomach and expects you to as well.
edit: and to directly address what you said, excusing a search engine's loss of content because sites have disappeared because the search engine dropped them is circular.
After testing with marginalia I found that much of it is still there - it is just suppressed by Google and Bing.
Google's "problem" is that they need to cater to the most common intents per query (see: lowest common denominator), and believe it or not, those intents are usually not biased toward in-depth educational content - isn't this why HN is such a nice niche?
Google could think about adding a different search result sorting option that attempts to prioritize high quality, thought provoking, or otherwise educational content above all else, but it makes sense to me why their primary search ranking algorithm works the way it does.
These days, the search volume went way up and my article went down to 6-10. The first three spots merely give a rough explanation of my in-depth topic. Quite insulting actually.
But upon further reflection I realized that most people these days only want a rough definition and no in-depth explanation. Google gives this to them.
The people who used to search for my keyword now add 2-3 more words to get to my in-depth article. The typical long tail.
What I find worrisome is that sometimes, the long tail query I use to find quality content gives me the same results as the unspecific short query. Some stuff is close to impossible to find without knowing a very topic-specific thing.
Preheat oven, insert chicken.
A bad search deserves a bad result. If you walked up to me and just said one word "chicken", I'd be insulted. If you said one word "chicken" while pointing at your mouth, I'd perhaps think you spoke little English and wanted a place to eat chicken. Providing a bit more info is useful to get decent results.
As Jerry Maguire once said, "help me help you"
Try something like this (just imagine a word or two that would appear in quality content about chicken and put it into marginalia):
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=poultry+farming&pr...
> We might be starting from the (slightly) false premise that the internet is full of quality content.
Well maybe it isn't but at least using Marginalia I get more of the results I want for these kinds of searches.
(I've also had good luck with a query about git a few weeks ago and yesterday with one about kubernetes.)
Google is intentionally dropping five year old results from the index and prioritizing five hour old results. They have complete control over whether they're doing this. Part of SEO is making five year old results look like five hour old results, which is something that Google did to spammers, not something that spammers did to google.
Google has decided that it is more profitable to make sure that somebody who types "chicken" into the search box gets either chicken restaurants nearby, or listicles and video covering the story on the news today about a chicken that scared away a bear. They've given up on depth.