Ask HN: Is the quality of the Internet rapidly going downhill?

A lot of the noise relates to stuff people find socially relevant (celebrity news, people blogging about food, mom forums, whatever other mind junk food you can think of), there is a huge increase in all of this kind of material. The flip side that the real intellectual/technical gems of material are being outpaced by the other types of content out there.

Also Google's drastically changed the way search works over the last few years (some might argue decade). The "organicness" has kind of been drained from search and has instead been replaced with Google's idea of convenience. The amount of chance and "freshness" in your results has been replaced by, not only SEO oriented content, but also by Google's expectations of what they think you wanted to find (a wikipedia article, an IMDB entry, a Google places listing). It works for some concrete stuff, but on the whole I think it's done a disservice to the core of what makes "the internet" the internet.

I would rather hope it is the latter - in response to SEO and increasing volume.

If humans want High Quality Automated Advice on their context-specific problems, then that's the next search engine.

Solving it - hard. But you can see the outlines of a solution with semantic web, auction sites, that annoying pop up on stack overflow, etc