Story

I've noticed that when I'm finally able to force my way past its behind-the-scenes AI query butchering, the number of pages that it's able to return is limited. Much more so than even a few years ago. Is it conceivable that Google has not only curtailed its forward indexing, but also purged some of its historical index (particularly of less popular pages)? I'll give my suspected reason: they're simply running out of cheap storage. From a layman's perspective, the loss of webpage caches, various aspects of their cloud storage situation (increased usage by users, increased pricing, incidents like the accidental loss of many users' location history), the data-heavy nature of their AI ventures, and the pace of data center buildout, all point (circumstantially) to data storage woes. But I don't have any direct insight or experience with these matters. So I'm wondering if anyone else is coming to similar conclusions, or at least has similar suspicions.