I'm trying to track some fairly simple things down on Google tonight, and am (not for the first time) becoming seriously annoyed at the kind of results I'm getting. It used to be, not all that long ago, that a well-written search would get the right page within the first ten hits, if not within the first five. These days, it seems that I'm lucky if I get appropriate links within the first several *dozen* results.

I don't think it's that I am searching for anything more esoteric than what I was a few years ago. In fact, I know I'm not -- looking for icons of cats, old computer game info, and so forth is what I've been periodically hunting down for the past ten years. My guess is that at least part of the damage is from the large number of pages that are nothing more than search engines with index words themselves. I wish Google could find a way to automatically "blacklist" those from appearing in its own listings...