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PageRank is basically worthless at this point. Its baseline assumption, that keywords and in-links correlate with relevance, is now broken. The vast majority of stuff out there is SEO'd and link-farmed to death. If you want to find anything relevant with PageRank these days, you first need to find a way to filter out all of the spam. This is why search is so hard now.

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> find a way to filter out all of the spam

It is the same spam sites I see again and again. A manual blacklist from one puny FTE would probably clean up the wast majority.

They could even crowd source this by allowing users to block domains from search results, which should affect its ranking long term.

As with so many things, they used to do this then inexplicably stopped.

You can use -inurl:example.com

But that would involve hiring a human. Google's prime directive is "Never hire a human do a job well, when you can train AI to do the same job badly"

Impossibly difficult and resource intensive? Sounds like we need a reset of some kind.

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