The Web has been a good place to do product research for the past four or five years, but a couple of recent experiences trying to check on a couple of consumer products has me wondering. What I noticed is that the first couple of pages of Google search results were almost all link farms and link aggregators, meaning there was not really any content on any of the pages, but just links to other pages, and most of them also turned out to be just lists of links.
In other words, Google was coughing up useless results. Are there still good sites with valuable information? There sure are, but it is increasingly harder to find them if you don't already have a bookmark for them.
Google's advertising program has made it profitable to set up these link farms; if even a few people click on some of the ads or paid links, the sites make money. The sites work because they have carefully studied the way Google ranks sites, and these sites make sure they have all the right keywords and links to rank high in the search ratings.
Google does not really care, because they get their cut of ad revenues no matter where the ad links are placed, but over the long term, it could be the death of Google, and indeed, any search site that values ad revenue more than useful results.
More broadly, this is the tragedy of the commons. A few unscrupulous people are ruining the "old" Internet, where there was a volunteer spirit and a commitment of mutual collaboration to make things work. Over the next five to ten years, more and more content will move behind carefully managed private networks where users will pay for content and services. In return, they will be spared the dreck and spam that is weighing down the public Internet. We'll still be able to roam the World Wide Web, but we won't be spending nearly as much time there.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; it means the Internet is growing up. The important issue is to make sure these private networks are managed by the community or a region, for the common good, so that innovation and commerce can flourish.