Results cluttered with spam pages, hiding useful content

Raised by 204 people over 19 years (2008–2026), in 18 of them.

What people report

2010-09
Googling for it was a complete waste of time.
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2020-12
Google results a lot of the times are SEO'd to shit and it's difficult to get any good answers anymore
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2022-11
it is often necessary to append something like "reddit", "forum", "wiki", or "news" to my search, lest I only encounter SEO trash
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2024-01
the official docs are buried under a pile of SEO shit
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2026-09
They're actively making it impossible to use search engines for their intended purpose
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Principle

Information foraging (least effort)

People want the most useful information for the least effort. Spam and content-farm pages make them click through and judge many results before finding a useful one, often adding site names to their queries as a workaround, so the page can no longer be scanned.

A fix

Give people direct tools to block or demote specific domains from their results, and show clearer source signals on each result, such as site type or whether the page is a forum or first-hand source.

Grouping, principle and fix drafted with Claude and reviewed by Justusability. Counts are people whose comment Claude labelled a usability complaint about this issue; see Method for how, and its limits. Something wrong here?

All 216 source comments