I literally cannot agree with you more. I've noticed that the bulk of my "searching behaviour" of about the last 2 years, has been a constantly increasing level of "aggressive specificity" to fend off the SEO spam. Multiple quoted segments, parentheses, OR keywords, the insanity that is the "required term flag", all used with increasing frequency to get decent results out of an increasingly irrelevant pile of garbage that I get when I perform basic "simple searches" for facts, references and other topic related information while working.
Don't get me started on the disgusting amount of stack overflow close sites I see frequently rated higher than SO itself due to content spam tactics, keyword stuffing and other grey hat SEO methods to make the sites more "appealing" in technical topic search results.
5 years ago we could easily differentiate between thin content(I.E. MAHALO) and quality content...but now there is so much "not quite spam, but overly redundant" content, regurgitated listicles and other keyword targeted content spawned by content writers instead of subject matter experts that I can't seem to find the really good content from search anymore.
Carefully Curated content is how I find the good information. Search used to be a convenience, now it adds layers of complexity to my search needs.
