Over the last year, its become palpable.
Google has such utility in this regard that in some cases, a hallucinating lie-machine offers better answer than an index of what information is available on the internet.
This issue with with Googles failure to respond to the deluge of SEO driven content in their searches. They can do better. They've chosen to not do so.
It can only index stuff that's on the Web. Stuff on the Web is, contrary to what is popularly asserted, only a tiny fraction of all human knowledge.
I think people are forgetting how bad search was before Google. Google drove Web directories to extinction. Remember Yahoo!? Back in that era, if I were looking for something as simple as the University of Michigan, I clicked and drilled down through a Yahoo directory. The obvious search query would have been useless. Google changed all that.
I view Google as the yellow pages. It works well for that. Is it an oracle of knowledge? Of course not. How could I possibly expect to find knowledge on a place where there is no reward for making it available? People producing knowledge don't work for free.
I've tried ChatGPT and it's no better. It serves up stuff that is flat-out wrong.
Not optimize for "most documents indexed" but "highest quality of results". One of them encourages adding spam to their index, the other encourages removing spam from their index.
HN is constantly pushing this notion that "spam" is some well-defined, solvable problem, so obviously Google wants it. That narrative just doesn't make sense from any angle. The notion that more click bait improves Google's bottom line is absurd
Product reviews alone, whether it is enterprise software or sports clothing should be something that they can easily comb through by hand, as humans, and uprank sites that are putting out more than affiliate link assemblies.
You are dealing with a moving target that has a huge financial incentive. It's a very difficult problem.