That used to be a direct result of how good the search was. In the aughts it was generally on page 1 or you had to rephrase your query; the remaining results were the era’s equivalent of ‘slop’, link trees and redirect rabbit holes and plaintext sites with random stolen content. I was met with genuine surprise any time I found what I was looking for on page 3 or 4
This was always a thing. The results on page 1 had a much greater click rate than on page 2+
That used to be a direct result of how good the search was. In the aughts it was generally on page 1 or you had to rephrase your query; the remaining results were the era’s equivalent of ‘slop’, link trees and redirect rabbit holes and plaintext sites with random stolen content. I was met with genuine surprise any time I found what I was looking for on page 3 or 4
Yeah, old search was just better
I’m wondering if SEO just got better and search is harder.