Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more than that. Google tracks how long you stay on a page whenever you use the back button to go back to the search results. The longer you stay on that page, the better the page will rank so once everyone figured it out, we started getting all that useless fluff before recipes because it increases the time spent on pages.
I've thought a lot about how Google is fucking privacy over, but I haven't appreciated how badly they've managed to hamper the web. It's not entirely their fault, SEO hacking isn't an easy problem, but the open web has certainly faltered under their stewardship. It's so incompetent it almost looks like an effort to make it harder to find things without having Google's AI cut it into small bite sized pieces. I think G…
It's honestly sad. Google could have gone in such a different direction. They're sitting on a gold mine but they caved into investor pressure to keep on pumping more gold instead of being happy with just the billions they would have made anyway.