My guess is doing exactly that is most the source of Google's problems right no, meanwhile the spammers do the exact same thing except trying to teach a ML model to successfully pose as authentic content, and what you get is the gloriosu mess we are in. (Even though it's just the last battle in a long war against spam)

Too much / too little, both are problematic I guess. This ends up becoming a war of algorithmic generation vs understanding, and devolves to effectively answering the age old question "is this spam"?

I was going to suggest that perhaps adding info about whether the site had ads, etc. might help the usability. Then I tried marginalia ... :) Perhaps we need to invest in similar detection for other antipatterns (listicles, blogspam etc.) - this is mostly what I was talking about. Less the understanding for indexing, and more the classification for user safety and authenticity of results.

But again, this is very cool.

Yeah maybe.

I don't know how useful these "hobo signs" actually are, but they did feel like a natural response to a lot of web sites justifying their use of trackers and cookies and affiliate links and whatnot with "everyone is doing this!"