I vaguely remember all those PageRank revisions, when some sites would get penalized for being slow or not well written. These days I'm not even sure if some sites are indeed gone or they just "fell off" Google search...
It may have certainly been friendly to a lot of users, yet it did not ring friendly to a lot of useful content.
Then also comes the geo segmentation. There was a time when quite a few results would be from foreign language sites or other countries. Sure, it created noise when the language was very much foreign, though later there often was a link to Google? translate.
I guess there may still be a way to have all that in the mix, but, generally the results are being streamlined.
I tried searching for something obscure recently - I knew the exact phrase and was confident it was only on one site. Google gave me nothing so I almost assumed the site was dead until I tried DuckDuckGo. I assume Google purged it because it wasn't using SSL.
It may have certainly been friendly to a lot of users, yet it did not ring friendly to a lot of useful content.
Then also comes the geo segmentation. There was a time when quite a few results would be from foreign language sites or other countries. Sure, it created noise when the language was very much foreign, though later there often was a link to Google? translate.
I guess there may still be a way to have all that in the mix, but, generally the results are being streamlined.