It's not SEO that's the problem. SEO is a symptom of the perverse incentives. So Google has created incentives (via ad embedding in user-sites) for entities to

It's not SEO that's the problem. SEO is a symptom of the perverse incentives. So Google has created incentives (via ad embedding in user-sites) for entities to generate content and compete with each-other for who can show the most ads. This in turn "pollutes the index" as the other poster phrased it, which makes it more and more difficult to find actual real (unique?) content, which then Google turns around and supposedly "helps" us with. Let's be honest. Despite it's surface-level gigantic scale, the internet is actually very tiny when it comes to real genuine content. My wild estimate is that 99% of it is spam. Even in the case of user-generated content, for every genuine blog where someone shares their thoughts and unique insights or content, there are a thousand blogs which are just there to get ad-views by generating any content that might get someone to look there. I can't even find the former type of blog/site anymore. The only place I still encounter those on occasion is when it's linked to from HN. And the ones I do encounter that way, I find that even when I try to, I can't find it via any sort of generic search (i.e. not cheating by using the site name / author / unique phrases). Splitting Google up won't fix this.