Since around 2012. What year would be the golden age of google search? I wonder if anyone has archived search result pages for relatively timeless queries so that we could compare. Wayback Machine seems to archive some of them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200801000000*/https://www.goog...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200801000000*/https://www.goog...
Around 2011 to 2012 after the first of many updates with names like hurricanes came and washed away the good.
Google search was actually great between the period where pagerank successfully defeated old-school SEO tactics and banner advertising starting earning enough that the "bloggers" could pay cheap writers to pad their articles in convincing ways.
First decade of the 2000's if I had to guess.
Re:Claude can now search the web
by qingcharles on Thursday March 20, 2025 @04:50PM
(#43428787)
2006 was the first year I remember paid blog posts appearing from content farms that would exist only to increase your inbound links and page rank. Those days companies were paying cents per post to get their sites to #1 in Google while Google just wagged their finger and said "naughty, naughty."
It's a shame, because Page Rank was a smart idea.
It used to be SO much less likely to return junk.