There's an inverse to this, too: Low-value content is far easier to distribute because distribution is now effectively costless, a situation deliberately created by online platforms that want bottom dollar works.

This effect isn't limited to web searches, either. Social media is way worse - at least Google pays you in presumably useful web traffic. Facebook and Twitter want to trap you on platform as long as possible. Even platforms like YouTube which pay their creators have this problem. So does Amazon, which encourages dropshipping cost-optimized products from China under weird, fly-by-night brand names. Their business model is to outsource the financial risk of creating new works to someone else so they can get "content" (or in the case of Amazon, actual products) for cheaper.

In the olden days, a publisher was a corporation that took on the financial burden and legal risk of publishing your work; with the caveat that only a limited number of things would be published. Thanks to a number of 90s era liability limitations, online service providers were given broad leeway on pretty much everything a traditional publisher would need to worry about: defamation, product liability, copyright infringement, and so on. This flipped the publisher model on it's head, creating the "platform model": one where you publish everything with no up-front cost or prior restraint, monopolize your creators' audiences, and make your money by taking cuts of whatever revenue streams your creators happen to establish after-the-fact.

Publishers had financial incentives to make their creative works more valuable. Platforms do just the opposite: their financial incentive is to devalue content. How do they do this? First off, they call it "content", as a generic catch-all term for anything their users publish. Second, they have no quality control mechanism, allowing literally anyone to submit content and have it promoted by their platform. Third, they run their platforms off of algorithms that use user-submitted feedback (reviews, upvotes, and so on) to judge group tastes in lieu of actually having taste. And finally, sometimes they'll just outright take money away from their creators in favor of their own stuff.

The reason why people were even putting high-value content on the web for free was because nobody knew how any of this would play out. Advertisers were paying far too much for banner ads, so it made perfect sense to just put all your content online, make sure people could see it, and get a lot of money. You used to be able to run a whole YouTube channel purely off of AdSense revenue! That's all gone away, now. Advertising networks pay out a lot less than they did even a decade ago, and at least in the case of Google, are also competing against their own creators for ad space to sell.

(This also implies that we will never actually go back to "the web as it used to be" until everyone alive has died and we can repeat the mistakes of the past. Hell, if you ask the copyright maximalist nutters, we've already repeated the mistakes of the past - publishers of centuries past acted a lot more like Internet platforms do today than modern publishers did pre-Internet.)