There's a number of things that have happened in the organic search area of Google that seem to suggest a declining interest in quality organic results. There's Matt Cutts' long leave of absence, his departure, and the announcement that he's not really being replaced. A much lower volume of communication from Google on initiatives in the space (they used to talk endlessly about Panda, Penguin, etc). Amit's original r…
There's some baseless speculation in this thread about what's Singhal's departure meant for Google search. It's important to remember that Singhal was committed Google's knowledge graph, a painstaking, manually constructed graph of entities and relationships that surfaces the occasional answer (ask Google what the capital of Azerbaijan is and you will see a knowledge graph answer). Knowledge graphs are brittle, hard to extend, and hard to modify in the face of changing data. Google has tilted towards machine learning and neural nets for a lot of functions, and Singhal was not part of that tilt. But you could argue that machine learning and neural nets are producing better results, which counters the argument that Singhal leaving means that Google doesn't care about organic results any more. That's BS, frankly.