Spam, clickbait and malicious content has always been around, yet Google somehow managed to filter it out just fine back in the day. As another commenter points

Spam, clickbait and malicious content has always been around, yet Google somehow managed to filter it out just fine back in the day. As another commenter points out, good content from the past still exists even, yet is no longer surfaced. Google can trivially detect all of the things wrong with the modern web and use them as negative ranking signals. Ads, analytics and affiliate links are a pretty good proxy for "shit site". The problem is that Google ultimately benefits from spam sites and bad results in many ways: * bad results increase the time you spend on search result pages and increase the probability the best "result" is actually one of the ads at the top * spam sites may contain Google ads and analytics Ultimately it is not in Google's interest to give you good results.