To a techie mailing list I'm on.
Here's evidence it worse than sucks: I'm working on some revisions to what was a short story, and may turn into a novelette. I need some information about the Russian city of Kursk around the year 1200. Five or six years ago, I found, among other things, a pic of a drawing? painting" of the city no later than 1600.
Now? Even after I exclude from the search battle, ussr, soviet, nuclear and a few more items, I can't find any real history of the city, when its walls were built, *zippo*.
The knowledge-shrinkage epidemic is even worse than that. Your experience is 100% valid, but what makes it worse is that during this same time period all our previously stable, richly-sourced knowledge management systems have been gutted. I am talking, of course, about libraries. Some of them held on during the 2005-2015 era, but in the past 10 years most have succumbed and the pace is only increasing. Because yes, from 1995-2015 (which we will look back later and recognize as Peak human-internet) you, a person, could use this information tool to access a wide variety of online sources. And if you couldn't find something online you could go down to your local library and get help using their much richer sources. The world we thought we were moving toward was one where any piece of knowledge could be accessed by anyone with minimal effort.
And so... libraries have been gutted by city managers and university business-ops managers who have replaced storehouses of on-prem information, staffed by on-prem professional researchers, with vendor products and an assumption that, "We don't need to hang on to primary sources and copies of books and microfilm, because pretty soon all of that will be on the Internet. Which also means we don't need to pay comp&ben for as many researchers and scholars to build and tend to these collections". So collections have been slashed - literally dumped into landfills by thousands of tons - because it's all online anyway, right?
Thus we begin manifesting the "Canticle For Liebowitz" scenario, where human knowledge only survives in a very few niche pockets where some group of monastic weirdos managed to hold onto their passion for Scholasticism despite the fires of ignorance scouring the planet. Everything else is the product of SEO/LLM autocoprophagia. The Internet is no longer a human tool. The Internet is now just an inhuman centipede gradually necrotizing as it recycles its own filth endlessly.