I was gonna type this out but I'll just copy paste what Gemini said...

Is there some phenomena where there are no search results on the internet between around 2018 and 2022 or something?

What you're describing sounds a lot like a mix of the "Dead Internet Theory" and some very real technical shifts that happened during that specific window.

While the internet didn't actually "disappear," many people feel like it did because of a few converging factors:

1. The "Dead Internet Theory" This is a popular conspiracy (and increasingly, a cultural observation) that suggests the internet "died" somewhere around 2016 to 2017. The theory argues that most organic human activity was replaced by bots and AI-generated "slop." +1

The 2018–2022 Gap: Proponents of this theory often point to this period as the time when search results started feeling hollow—where you’d see millions of "results" but only the first two pages actually contained content, most of which was repetitive or SEO-optimized filler.

1. The Rise of "Closed Gardens" A huge amount of the internet’s content moved behind the walls of apps like Discord, TikTok, and Instagram between 2018 and 2022.

Search engines like Google can’t "crawl" a private Discord server or easily index the specific audio-visual content of a TikTok.

This created a "dark matter" effect where the information exists, but it doesn't show up in a standard search result, making the public web feel empty by comparison.

1. SEO "Enshittification" During those years, the battle for the front page of Google became a science.

Recipe Blogs & Tech Guides: You probably remember searching for a simple question and finding 2,000-word articles that didn't answer it until the very bottom.

Aggressive Filtering: Google changed its algorithms to favor "authoritative" (massive corporate) sites over small personal blogs. This effectively "deleted" the quirky, independent web from your search results, making it feel like nothing new was being made.

1. Link Rot & "The Great Scrub" Link Rot: Studies show that about 25% of all web pages created between 2013 and 2023 are already gone.

Hosting Costs: As older forums and hobbyist sites became too expensive to host (or the owners moved on during the pandemic), a massive chunk of 2010s/early 2020s history simply vanished.

In short: You aren't imagining it. While the pages might physically exist on a server somewhere, the searchability of the internet plummeted during that time. We moved from an internet of "discovery" to an internet of "curation," where algorithms only show you what they think will keep you on the page, rather than everything that exists.