Up until relatively recently, people didn't just vomit lies onto the internet at an industrial scale. By and large if you searched for something you'd see a correct result from a canonical source, such as an official documentation website or a forum where users were engaging in good faith and trying their best to be accurate.
That does seem to have changed.
I think the question we should be asking ourselves is 'why are so many people lying and making stuff up so much these days' and 'why is so much misinformation being deliberately published and republished.'
People keep saying that we're 'moving into a post-truth era' like it's some sort of inevitability and nobody seems to be suggesting that something perhaps be... done about that?
The internet was a short reprieve because putting data up on the internet, for some time at least was difficult, therefore people that posted said data typically had a reason to do so. A labor of love, or a business case, in which these cases typically lead to 'true' information being posted.
If you're asking why so much bullshit is being posted on the inet these days, it's because it's cheap and easy. That's what has changed. When spam became cheap, easy, and there was a method of profiting from it, we saw it's amount explode.
Who are these people that go around getting random answers to questions from the internet then blindly believing them? That doesn't work on Google either, not even the special info boxes for basic facts.