@guacamayan once upon a time.

user-generated links now come from the gigasites and SEO manipulation. organic linking of good content from user-controlled sites is overwhelmed to negligibility. traditional Google page rank fails to provide quality results.

Google increasingly not only downranks in the list but refuses to surface more obscure results. it relies on the "authority" of linkers, which means, it builds in a Matthew effect.

it's quite terrible now.

but then, so are its competitors.