Comment by abhish16

I genuinely feel that search engines, especially Google after 2020, played a major role in wiping out personal blogs.

There was a time when searching for anything online, say best running shoes or how to install a WordPress plugin, gave you a healthy mix of personal websites, hobby blogs, and commercial sites.

Then Google rolled out EEAT or whatever and the spotlight shifted almost entirely to big commercial websites. These companies hire professional writers for every niche. People with degrees, credentials, and polished resumes that an individual blogger simply cannot compete with. Naturally, Google’s algorithm began pushing those sites to the top over individual bloggers assuming better information and content due to more impressive writer's resume.

So now, if you search for the same things like running shoes, WordPress tutorials, anything remotely informational, the top results are all from big commerical websites and strangely total "unrelated" garbage after the 3rd page.

Sometimes it reaches an absurd point like search results showing Forbes or similar outlets giving you medical or legal advice right in the first page if not the first suggestion.

Google seems to forget that these articles often come with an inherent bias, a subtle (or not so subtle) push to sell something, regardless of how qualified the writer is.