Seems like the poisoning of the internet is coming to a head. While searching earlier for a first principles reference to answer a question with, I came across an entirely obfuscated query.

"Codd's forms of normalization"

https://google.com/search/...

In the first four pages, there are 5 results that aren't ad farms, crappy pasta tutorial sites, brand building articles, poorly understood rote regurgitation of information, quora, or some combination of all of the above.

In 2005, the top 5 would likely have contained Bell Labs, UoI, Cambridge and Oracle. Mind you, I don't think the world is getting dumber, exactly, just that the signal to noise ratio in the information sphere is getting worse and the risk from that is the world becomes markedly "dumber". The only barrier to entry anymore is how well your SEO optimization competes.

I'm obviously getting old.

/rant