Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says

At work, we have this tradition of naming our video call channels with random emojis.
Yesterday, I named it 🎍 and a colleague asked what that emoji is supposed to be.

The thing is, I had this conversation with another colleague before, when I chose that same emoji some months ago.

In the emoji selector, it's called "pine decoration", so as Firefox readily told me, I had searched for those exact words before, in this case on Qwant, not Google.
So, I directly opened that search result link from the browser history and the first page of search results just showed random Etsy links and such. For now, it still looks the same: https://www.qwant.com/?q=pine+decoration&t=web

When I searched it a few months ago, I was amazed that the first link, along with the whole inline-Wikipedia-blurb, was the relevant result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadomatsu
(This was also still in my browser history.)

I don't need to be amazed every time, but fuck me, it feels like the internet is having Alzheimer's.

is losing has long since lost

Hell, Google opened up the whole thing by prioritising sites with SEO. I really can't find any pity in my heart for them.

And honestly, by now we can just assume that SEO is spam. A search engine worth its salt should be able to find better results without it, just going on inbound links, traffic and (shock! horror!) relevant keywords in the actual content.

It's a radical idea, I know.

It’s comically bad now

This is dumb, they are prioritizing paid adds for almost the whole first page of results.

…I sure as heck didn’t need a study to figure this one out