We used to have just Internet grep but it was awful because sites just slammed tons of keywords into invisible text to get fake traffic. That's what spawned the original innovation at Google of PageRank and thus the SEO wars started. Going back to that wouldn't solve the issue with modern search.
If we only had a downvote or don’t show me results from this source this problem would be solved. Google didn’t want to give us that feature because of … different incentives, no other reason comes to mind. I’ve witnessed google search become worse and worse and now it’s barely useful
I know they would not do this but you aren't the only one that thinks in those veins. I'm so tired of all of the pinterest spam I pretty much gave up on google for anything other than code searches which funny enough can be done better and more naturally through a GPT type AI.
That would cut down on some of the concentrated SEO spam centers but I think you'd still be fighting an endless battle with more distributed SEO spam sites that are more focused on one point.
