We are approaching a digital Kessler syndrome, or perhaps a Deepwater Horizon info-oilspill event, where there is so much useless SEO-driven slop (soon to be taken webscale with the advent of genAI) to sift through on the internet that it's growing increasingly difficult to find the signal amidst the noise. Google, once a prestigious company which prided themselves on "organizing the world's information" and "not being evil," eventually became a target for those wanting to peddle their wares and make a quick buck - a departure from the days of the early Internet which was mostly computer geeks, hobbyists, and forward thinkers sharing organic content they thought was interesting or useful. Because search was Google's entire business, they needed to develop countermeasures to combat spammers and pages gaming Google's algorithm with questionable SEO techniques in order to preserve the signal-to-noise ratio of the search engine results page.

This is now a bygone era - after discarding their original motto of "don't be evil," search and "organizing the world's information" are no longer Google's business, it's hawking advertisements [0]:

When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three
of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the
company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new
reality of their jobs.”

On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close
to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all
that Google was thinking about.”

Hence questionable grey UX patterns like blurring the distinction between ads and organic content, and sometimes cramming the page so full of ads that all the actual results are "below the fold." Remember the old Internet adage - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product - and like cattle we are all just herded into digital pens to be served marketing slop to serve the real customer - the advertisers.

If you want to be treated as a customer instead of cattle, you ought then to pay for your services, including search, to align the financial incentives with your own. Advertising needs to die, for it is a root cause of most of the ills of the modern internet [1]. If you can pay for streaming services or music, you can certainly pay for access to high quality organic information that actually aligns with your interests - not that of the advertisers. I've been using Kagi for a few years now and it really does hearken back to Google SERP quality maybe not at its peak, but rounding near to it.

At the risk of sounding elitist (and so what), this is just another consequence of the recurring Eternal September phenomenon - highly focused communities with a strong concentration of geeks, hobbyists, and experts were the norm back then, when computers were still new and arcane devices that were difficult to operate. The bar to entry was much higher, and one had to do a little bit of "reading the fucking manual" simply to get online and understand how to navigate the net effectively. Now that all the balls have been poured into the Galton board we have regressed to the mediocrity of content that exists on the contemporary Web, absent those pressures that once selected for high quality content online.

[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41940718