Some people seem to believe that’s the case. Now — I have no idea if that’s true or not, this is more of a conjecture than a proven fact (and we have no way of checking: the algorithm is, of course, a black box to us).
That said, it seems to me that in recent years Google has tweaked its ranking to give more prominence to what’s hot and trending. Design choices — such as the news carousel featuring at the top of most searches — end up giving more weight to recency over accuracy, to what happened today over the historical analysis and background of a situation. These days the first page of a Google search is mostly a collection of news articles.
That’s saddening, even if no forgetting was happening. This focus on novelty over knowledge diverges from my view on what the web should be, as Tim Bray writes:
My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library.
