Entertainment/news sites are chock full of pages like "<whatever>, what we know so far, release date, cast, will it be renewed, has it been cancelled..." pages that spend many paragraphs saying "we know nothing, randomly plucking crap out of thin air we could guess something-or-other but that remains to be confirmed". A new news story, film, show, or even just a hint of something, and the pages go up to try capture early clicks. Irritatingly they are often not updated quickly when real information becomes available or that information changes (particularly over the last year that has affected release dates). I have several sites DNS blocked because that annoys me less than getting one of these useless/out-of-date pages more often than not when I follow one of their links.
BTW, news websites in question are not doing it only for opening times but for any popular search phrase they can come up. Would be such a shame if outlets like BBC, WSJ and others adopted that kind of SEO.
From personal experience, I switched to another tool (DDG) a couple of years ago. When I occasionally try Google, for 95% of common requests I'm appalled by the results: the top is only SEO garbage. For very specific and precise searches (where people are not trying to game the system), Google is still the best, though.
The best is minus operands acting more like plus or quotes.
I've noticed a rise of that as well. With some searches such spam is all I've received. But that's really a problem in all languages Google supports I think.
There's even malware that infects websites and generates such content, not sure what's the point of that. Anyone knows?
I changed the default search engine from Google to Bing and DDG in all browsers. Google does have better results, so sometimes I still need to use them. But for 90% of generic queries such as the weather, product information, or finding a company's website, Bing is good enough.
The format goes like this: Lately people are searching for XYZ but is it safe to search for XYZ? What experts say for XYZ? To find out continue to read our article.
Then it's followed by wall of text made of keywords(in sentences that don't make sense), if you are lucky there would be the opening hours(which are often not accurate) somewhere down the text.
But that doesn't stop there. Even actual news articles are written for the consumption of the Google bot, the sentences often don't make sence, they are repeated multiple times with the synonyms of one of the words, making it into a lengthy article that doesn't have any meat beyond the title.
I argue that the problem is not SEO experts with low ethics, the problem is the way the business is structured. SEO experts don't do it for the sake of the art but because they are paid to do it. They are paid to do it because it has a positive ROI on bringing eyeballs and people pay Google for eyeballs, then Google pays those who generate the eyeballs.
Isn't it better for Google and everyone involved if you can't find what you are looking for, continuing your search brings more eyeballs? It's not like you are going to switch to Bing? You are also not going to abandon the internet and go to a library.