Google's death is deeper than just the corpus, their ranking algorithm is also deeply degrading.
A week ago, a search for < James Palmer manchester foreign policy > wouldn't return https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-p... on the first page while < James Palmer manchester site:foreignpolicy.com > would [1] [2]. This appears to be fixed as of today but this kind of kindergarten level search intent not being fulfilled would have been unthinkable for Google even just a few years ago.
A week ago, a search for < James Palmer manchester foreign policy > wouldn't return https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/23/i-love-manchester-but-p... on the first page while < James Palmer manchester site:foreignpolicy.com > would [1] [2]. This appears to be fixed as of today but this kind of kindergarten level search intent not being fulfilled would have been unthinkable for Google even just a few years ago.
[1] https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1670904508191322112
[2] https://twitter.com/shalmanese/status/1670973880637493249