[xboxnolifes]

I don't think Google Search got worse, as in, I don't think changes they made directly made search a worse experience than not adding the change. I think that spam posters, scammers, et al., have gotten much better at gaming SEO, that Google got stuck with two bad options: (1) do nothing and have all common search terms loaded with spam, scams, and viruses, or (2) change how their search works to lessen the amount of bad actors, but also reduce the good search outcomes showing up.

Maybe I'm wrong. This is just a hunch based on looking at how big online communities fail, and how services that rely on user generated content fail. At a certain scale, you can no longer rely on people being good actors with light moderation. You need to tighten up moderation, even if it means making the community overall worse than it's peak. As, the alternative is letting the bad actors make it even worse than that.

More and more lately I've been coming across spam, reposted content from sites like StackOverflow, w3schools, Reddit, etc., but posted on different domains, on a page plastered with ads. To me, this is a peak into the arms race between Google's Search trying to return good results, and bad actors trying to get their spam to the front results.