[mikevin]

I don't know if I can agree, yes SEO spam is probably worse but it's grown side-by-side with Google, both sides have more money and resources.

SEO spammers decided to improve their tools/techniques. Google realized they could earn just as much by replacing their grep-for-the-web search-engine with some NLP, ML and fuzzy matching on what I strongly suspect to be a tiny subset of the index they had before.

I understand the reasoning and I admit it does a really good job at correcting mistakes but I often wonder if anyone working on the search-engine actually uses it to find development related information.

Maybe I'm in some kind of A-B testing hell but my results often show 1 relevant random url and a tiny a stackoverflow box with other relevant information and then always the same 10-20 stackoverflow/github copycats. Scrolling down just loops those same sites over and over again. Similarly I've never had Google link to the official python docs, it's always some spammy website that copy pasted a docstring and decorated it with ads/share buttons.

I don't understand how that's not bothering people that actually work on the search-engine.