Google is apparently struggling to contain an ongoing spam attack

Overall sentiment on Google & YouTube quality

• Many commenters feel Google products (Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps) are increasingly “spammy” and less useful.
• YouTube ads are described as low-quality, sometimes obvious fraud (e.g., deepfake celebrity investment pitches), with suspicion that repetition is used to push users toward paid ad-free options.
• YouTube search is reported to surface AI-generated junk, irrelevant shorts, and clickbaity thumbnails (e.g., pimple-popper content) even for technical queries.

Are Google search results “mostly spam”?

• Some claim Google Search has become unusable for productive work and long-tail queries, often appending “reddit” or “wikipedia” to get useful results.
• Others test specific queries (e.g., book titles) and report perfectly reasonable, non-spammy result pages.
• Explanations for divergent experiences include:
  • Account-specific ranking behavior or temporary “blackhole” quality issues.
  • Potential browser/machine malware hijacking results for some users.
  • Regional and personalization differences.

Details of the current spam attack & anti-spam policies

• The article’s author (identified in-thread) attributes the surge to:
  • Exploiting long-tail, low-competition queries that hit more permissive algorithms.
  • Triggering Local Search, which is said to be easier to game.
• Spammers use IP-based cloaking: serving clean content to Googlebot IPs and redirects/garbage to users.
• Google’s guidelines still forbid cloaking and “sneaky redirects,” but enforcement is described as difficult and often manual.
• Ex–trust-and-safety staff describe multi-signal, risk-averse automation to avoid false positives, especially where content differs by region or legality.

SEO, AI content farms, and perceived decline

• Many note a rise in long, generic, SEO-fluffed articles where the real answer is buried under filler, increasingly suspected to be LLM-generated.
• Google’s emphasis on “topical authority” and large, keyword-rich pages is blamed for incentivizing such content.
• Several commenters argue that to rank now, even legitimate sites feel forced to mass-produce AI content and aggressive geo/keyword variants.

Alternatives and user coping strategies

• Significant interest in alternatives: Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Phind, and specialized tools (Stack Overflow, GitHub, forums).
• LLMs (ChatGPT, Kagi FastGPT, Perplexity, Bing Chat) are increasingly used instead of web search, especially for technical overviews, though concerns include:
  • “Information tunnel” effects and over-trust in whatever is retrieved.
  • Heavy safety filters limiting domains like medical information.
• Users value features like domain blacklists, boosting/pinning favored sites, and “lenses” (topic-specific ranking).

Broader structural issues

• Reports of sites where ~60–90% of traffic is from crawlers; this fuels discussion of the “dead internet” idea and infrastructure burden.
• Some argue Google’s ad-driven incentives no longer align with improving organic quality; others counter that long-term ad revenue still depends on usable search.
• Proposed directions include open/non-profit search, curated directories or vertical search, and standards like IndexNow or crawler hints to reduce unnecessary crawling.