Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah, and about a decade before LLMs were actually usable, they started to sabotage simple substring searches and kind of force this more conversational interface. That’s when simple search terms stopped working very well, and you had to instead ask yourself “hmm how would a very old person or a small child phrase this question for a magic oracle”
This is how we get stuff like: Did you mean “when did Shakespeare die near my location”? If anyone at google cared more about quality than printing money, that thirsty gambit would at least be at the bottom of the page instead of the top.