Search Engines Are Broken

I used to think I could find anything I want on the internet as long as it exists on some computer serving it. However, recently, especially since around two years ago, search engine results seem to be filled with endless SEO optimized low quality "spam".

I don't exactly know what happened and when it happened, but it seems like Google dramatically changed the way they rank the results. It used to be simple, at least for the user. You used to enter keywords and it listed you the most relevant pages that inculde them. Now every time I search for something, it feels like I'm fighting against the engine. Sometimes I get results that don't have any of the words -or their synonyms- at all. There seems to be some kind of machine learning involved that tries to connect some words or searches together and shows you the results for any of them regardless of which one you use. Consequently, I end up banging my head against the wall.

If this was the only problem, I would have no problem with "getting over it". Unfortunately, it is just the tip of the "SEO iceberg". Regardless of what I'm looking for, all I get is some "blog" posts, all written in the same style. Sometimes I even wonder, did someone prompt GPT-3 to generate countless blog posts so they can generate clicks. What is even more suspicious is that when I try to navigate these sites, they are filled with random posts about random irrelevant topics.

We also have scraper websites, that just copy other websites. I'm not talking about the good ol' plagiarism. These websites are fully automated with the sole purpose of stealing content, mostly user generated content. This can be either Stackoverflow answers, Github wiki pages or sometimes even books.

Again, it gets even worse. The actual human generated content is moving to a certain style of writing. Now all pages have some varation of this outline:

Title: Top 7 Things Maybe Relevant To Your Search Terms
Intro
Table of contents
Numbered list of items with brief, useless descriptions.
Some referral links
Paraphrasing of the intro

I doubt I am the only one who thinks this way. I very often find myself appending "reddit" to my searches. This shows that "the internet" lost it's value in finding information, so we are just back to word of mouth - but with astroturfing... The Internet has already became a centralized dystopia and search engines are making it worse.

Prime of the internet is long gone, and what's coming is even worse than today.