"Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history?"
To me it's a lot simpler than that: on Usenet one could find people exchanging opinions about a product while on today's web searches all we find is companies selling that product. Just try searching for anything and see how deep you need to go until you get something that resembles a legit conversation about something rather than people selling it.
It was about monetizing every search results page, and that goal became clear to me when they removed the discussion search option from the search engine; that was the final nail in the coffin for the Internet as we knew it.
To me it's a lot simpler than that: on Usenet one could find people exchanging opinions about a product while on today's web searches all we find is companies selling that product. Just try searching for anything and see how deep you need to go until you get something that resembles a legit conversation about something rather than people selling it. It was about monetizing every search results page, and that goal became clear to me when they removed the discussion search option from the search engine; that was the final nail in the coffin for the Internet as we knew it.
Some background: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...