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.
#1 result is a long article with culinary history, detailed instructions, many pictures, and a credited author originally from Shanghai.
#2 result is a simple recipe listing from Buzzfeed. Written by a young white guy from Minnesota who worked as a producer. No fluff, no pictures, no backstory. Doubtful the author ever made the recipe at all. You could grab a recipe database and generate thousands of these pages.
I've been burned by #2 too many times disregard the fluff. It shows their investment in the content.