Modern day seo spam is attributed to Google dumping page rank in American serps starting back in 2018. Brands were propped up by signals others can't emulate and the smart seos realized it was a fools errand to work anywhere except in house at said brands so they could continue to easily spam and not get noticed, collect easy pay checks and sit on hacker news all day.
This take is so tiring to read on HN. GOOG won the FUD WAR with Russias misinfo playbook.
Ohh yea. E-a-e-t.
GOOG doesn't track clicks either..........
Well whatever the cause, SEO spam means that searching for anything generally popular returns pages and pages of results to sites with low depth content and no real substance.
I realized this when I was curious to know when a TV show’s next season may start and all the search results were useless fluff articles, even though their titles looked promising.
In conjunction with my having concluded some time prior that they had generally switched their search (for example when searching for software development stuff) to seemingly always assume I was actually searching for something else, made me convinced that Google had become quite useless.