[hftf]

I entirely agree.

Quora and Pinterest are particularly routine spam sites in my search results.

They rank just below word reference site spam, like dictionaries, thesauruses, or translation dictionaries (sites which I do benefit occasionally from), and below Wikipedia mirrors (which I feel has become so bad that I can't even get legitimate results talking about the problem itself! Try searching something like: search results spam wikipedia mirror "revolvy" "wikiwand").

But for me, the worst (and most obvious!) offenders by far are "pronunciation guide" spam sites. Just a few examples:

  howtopronounce.com
  howtopronounce.co.in
  pronouncekiwi.com
  pronouncenames.com
  pronunciationof.com
  rightpronunciation.com

plus the scourge of 16-second YouTube videos on channels with names like Pronunciation Guide or Emma Saying.

(If you search for something like "Deidesheimer pronunciation" or "pronounce Canynge" on Google, the vast majority of results will be those spam sites, plus maybe an ancient forum thread from 2004 that veered off topic before anyone even tried to give a serious yet uninformed answer.)

These ad-infested spam sites purport to teach you how to pronounce an unfamiliar name or tricky word (an important and underappreciated service that many people use!). But usually they merely contain computer-generated bullshit, as if fed directly into all available text-to-speech algorithms. Even the ostensibly human-generated recordings and sites are often flagrantly wrong, unsourced, and untrustworthy.

There are a few legitimate sites (such as Forvo, Youglish, etc.), but too often they are woefully incomplete (by nature of their being crowdsourced). Forvo even contributes to the spam with "do you know how to pronounce this word?" false positives.

I once blocked all of the spam sites when the domain-blocking feature you mentioned was built into Google Search; then had to do it once again when I needed a browser add-on to replace the removed feature (which naturally only worked on desktop); and recently I was astonished to find that the add-on also stopped working! The spam never ends.

[raphlinus]

I know, right? How hard would it be for someone to make a wiki-style site with UGC, a reputation system (I speak this language natively and vouch / do not vouch for this content), a tracker for trending words, fun articles for Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and the like? The Web I used to know seems to be gone or at least in steep decline, supplanted by garbage like this.

[mguerville]

There are also the White pages duplicates. Search for a phone number or some digits that resemble a phone number and the first 5 pages of results are all autogenerated reverse lookups under various domains catering to the different plausible personas.

[lokedhs]

Try searching for “1549 USD in EUR”, and you'll find links to sites that auto-generates individual pages for every amount.

One might argue that the SEO garbage here is less bad, since there really isn't any alternative site they're stealing hits from, but it's still a sign that shows just how horrible the web has become.