Search has degraded substantially in the past 5 years for reasons wholly, completely, and absolutely unrelated to SEO blogspam.

Google of 5 years ago didn't ignore words in almost every single query I made. Google of 5 years ago didn't constantly give me irrelevant garbage because they keep ignoring the words I use in my query.

This is a wholly separate issue from SEO crap. Ignoring search terms is 100% a Google issue and is 100% Google's fault!

Google search degraded in usefulness before the panda update, when spammers had filled the web with low quality content designed to exploit Google's algorithms. Google improved their search to punish the content farms, and people were happy with that search for many years.

Agreed. That’s really my thoughts.

The internet or rather the crawlable WWW itself has changed.

The WWW content itself is no longer what it was.

A close approximation might be a search-mode which penalizes results based on how many ads they have and how much of the page they cover...

I'm fine with this internet but the previous search.

It did degrade a bit. But Kagi and Perplexity proved (in very different ways) that you can get significantly better search from the same internet that Google uses.

What I really want is me from 5-10 years ago. When can we get a pill that will do that?

Exactly. In a constantly changing world, you need constantly changing policy to achieve the same outcomes. Even then you probably won't replicate the past universe perfectly.

append ' before:2023' to your google searches.

I want the Internet from 5-10 years ago before Google incentivized this much SEO garbage. It wasn't awesome then but it was a lot better.