Same experience. Changing the special characters' meanings ruined my google-fu, and starting around ~'08-'09 they seemed to give up fighting linkfarm sites and just stopped ever ranking small sites highly unless you search for something so specific that only one small site could possibly match.
It's made the web feel way, way smaller than it used to, and probably has made it smaller by starving small-but-relevant sites of traffic. Meanwhile any content site (news sites and such) that appears on the first page of results is now virtually indistinguishable from the horrible old link farms, in terms of screen real estate devoted to scummy ads.
The Old Web had popups and such, but even so the modern web feels way dirtier, somehow.
>"It's made the web feel way, way smaller than it used to, and probably has made it smaller by starving small-but-relevant sites of traffic. "
That's the beauty of it (For Google, anyways). Now those small, traffic-starved sites are dependant on getting traffic via paid adwords. Either that, or they have to rely on "organic" social-media cruft in order to get anywhere meaningful.
It's made the web feel way, way smaller than it used to, and probably has made it smaller by starving small-but-relevant sites of traffic. Meanwhile any content site (news sites and such) that appears on the first page of results is now virtually indistinguishable from the horrible old link farms, in terms of screen real estate devoted to scummy ads.
The Old Web had popups and such, but even so the modern web feels way dirtier, somehow.