I've sort of had this same experience myself. The quality of links for obscure topics is nowhere near as good as it used to be. It's harder and harder to find the topics I know exist, sometimes they're buried under lots of irrelevant results, or results I know about aren't there at all. I've not experienced the 'bot' throttling to my knowledge, but it certainly feels like they're trying to do some kind of language translation for me when I want explicit results. I'm not convinced Advanced search isn't doing similar translations either
