Not only are they becoming answer engines, in Google's case there's a decent chance that they're making money off the spammy pages. If the top results are "SEO

Not only are they becoming answer engines, in Google's case there's a decent chance that they're making money off the spammy pages. If the top results are "SEO stuffed spam websites", they're probably also loaded with ads. If they're loaded with ads, there's a good chance that they're using Google's ads. If the top results are "SEO stuffed spam websites", there's a good chance they're chock-full of affiliate links. If a search for "best baby formula" is going to end up costing Amazon an affiliate fee via an "SEO stuffed spam website", Amazon might as well just buy a Google ad for that keyword and cut out the "SEO stuffed spam website". If the results go to pages that are just going to cost a seller money anyway, it gives the seller more incentive to buy ads since they aren't getting free traffic from the search engine anyway. While being an answer engine keeps you on their page longer, feeding you SEO spam also keeps you coming back to their page; feeding you SEO spam signals to potential advertisers that they won't be getting free traffic from the search engine so they might as well pay for the traffic via ads. I'm not suggesting that it's a conspiracy to send you bad results, but it does seem likely that as long as they aren't losing traffic to competitors, it might not be something that becomes a priority.