Some would counter that 3rd parties have been manipulating google search results, and that is true, but it overlooks the fact that Google is largely responsible for incentivizing that kind of behavior. Google is an advertising company that has a search engine and they pay sites to host their ads because on site traffic so those sites in turn try to manipulate google search results to increase their traffic.

There was a discussion about this topic on Hacker News a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

One ex-Googler pointed out that due to the machine learning stuff and every new employee trying out the latest “AI” stuff on top of it, no human can understand and thus debug the search engine properly anymore.

Wanna know a secret?

All big companies are degrading in the same way.

Teams cut down to 25% staffing with critical support roles sunsetted instead of backfilled. Revenue demands increasing quarter over quarter. Budgets declining. Profits higher than ever before, beating earnings by over 50% quarter over quarter 2 quarters in a row.

Mistakes costing more and more money, sucking up more labor to fix that is already spread thin. I’m the project lead on half a dozen projects ranging from $100k to $1.6m in capital expense each, simultaneously, by myself.

My role is not designed for project work. It’s supposed to be routine maintenance and operations. Which I’m also doing.

The entire corporate world is about to eat shit and reap what they’ve sown. And stocks will be higher than ever before.

The Western world is in free collapse, yall. Hope you realize and prepare accordingly before those funny TikToks of homeless people you watch have you in them.

Welcome to the endgame of capitalism.

Stract.com search engine is what Google seach was 15 years ago when algorithm was based on content, not ads.