Comment by friendzis

> In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".

"SEO" is not some magic, it is "compliance with ranking rules of the search engine". Google wanted to make their lives easier, implemented heuristics ranking slop higher, resulting in two things happening simultaneously: information to slop ratio decreasing AND information getting buried deeper and deeper within SRPs.

> do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10286719?hl=en-... Google is literally rewriting the queries. Not only results with better potential for ads outrank more organic results, it is impossible to instruct the search engine to not show you storefronts even if you tried.