What strikes me is that Google doesn't fix some of the blatant offenders. For example, the other day I was looking for tablets, so I seached for "best tablets of 2023". And it's obvious that many websites are auto-generated, that the content itself was written several years ago, and the years have magically been updated to the present. Half of the first ten links are to pages like this.

I don't expect Google to de-list things. But I do expect that the developers would look at the top ten results for common searches like this and penalize major websites for intentionally creating deceptive content.

Similarly, I would expect all search engines to lower ratings on websites that are ad-heavy. Users want information, not sparkly ads. This is easy to detect and optimize for.

But hey, people wanna make their money, so they'll do what they do.