[Bjartr]

For sure. Google's ability to surface useful pages above SEO gamed "articles" has been dropping for years. I've had to start adding '-best' and '-top' to searches in an attempt to stop getting blogspam stuff like "december 2020 best X" with no substance when searching for X.

It used to be possible to, for some topics, limit the search period to pre 2010 to help improve the relevancy of results. But I've started to notice that their index seems to be forgetting about the past as time moves on.

[panic]

> But I've started to notice that their index seems to be forgetting about the past as time moves on.

A few months ago I was trying to find an old mailing list post using Google. I tried every combination of search terms I could think of, but it didn't show up. Later, I managed to find a direct link to the post in my notes. It turns out Google just wasn't indexing it at all -- searching literal excerpts from the post in quotation marks didn't give any results either. I just tried it again (I believe the post was https://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg01802.html), and it still doesn't seem to be indexed, though now there's another archive of the same mailing list which does show up in the results.

[userbinator]

Google Memory Loss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840

[ASalazarMX]

Not only that. Suddenly some corporation learns to "game the SEO", and keeps their spam on the first page of results for months, without users having a choice to block or report it, like Pinterest.

IMO it looks more like advertising deal than SEO gaming.

[techrat]

I'm really disappointed that Google removed the ability to ban domains from search results. Pinterest was one of the first to go.

For those wondering, this it what it looked like: https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...