For me it started when they began to monkey with the search entries and "second guess" what I was searching for. My guess is that they lost track of unvarnished human interaction and things snowball from there. That's just my hunch. People gave up trying to actually rely on it. We've all learned that Google doesn't care.
Basically it used to be optimized to be a sharp knife but now it's optimized to be a safety knife.
IMO that particular aspect is what made Google stand out to the general audience. Most people don’t search by keywords, or optimize their queries to hint the engine. They just type a question and assume Google will make sense of what they meant. Google usually does that very well, and that high level understanding is not compatible with our keyword query expectations. To us that feels broken, but to the majority of people it’s working as designed.
Instead I think search results have been getting worse for everyone because of SEO. Companies want to optimize for number of ads viewed, not quality of content, thus quality goes down in favor of clickbait and keyword stuffing.
I don’t think there’s much Google can do here to resolve this issue. It’ll always be a game of cat and mouse between Google and companies using SEO to push more ads for less money.
Can we attribute the decline in quality to the decline in informative content proportional to garbage content?
Garbage content seems to be making massive gains year on year, while informative or high quality content has stagnated or even declined from data decay
I think part of the problem is that Google has a recency bias. Newer, more spammy, sources get priority over older ones - even if the older ones are of higher quality.
I have seen others comment on this as well.
I cant say I know when the trend started.
Could this have been running / going on for a long while without getting the scrutiny, it needed?
Is this spam attack the final act?