The problem is they spam the actual forums themselves.

I assume all those posts such as “what did buy (for less than $x) that you find most useful” are spammers so they can reply with their own products.

And I am sure they are making posts asking for product/restaurant/etc recommendations and then replying to themselves.

I remember encountering this in LinkedIn groups.

I had joined a few (like The Swift Programming Language), and would see questions like "I have this problem <Detailed description of the issue>, how can I solve it?"

Since (in at least one case) this was a problem I had easily solved, years before, I would provide a detailed, concise, answer, showing how to deal with it in a few lines of code.

My answer would get ignored.

Instead all these replies would show up, saying things like "I added the <XXX Library>, and it solved the problem!". These would get voted up, and the original poster would actually engage them.

After seeing a few of these, I realized that LI groups are dumpster fires, and quit them all.

As long as "site:" still works (limiting your search scope to a particular domain), then the SEO'ers can pound sand. Pretty much 100% of my google searches these days are scoped to a particular domain. This is because my search needs in 202x are very different than in 200x. Back then, I wanted to find the right web site for X. Today, I know the best web sites for X, and I always want to search for that exact X on that exact site.

I am no longer interested in discovering new web sites. The established ones are known to be good, and any new, unknown one is almost 99.9999% likely to be SEO spam. For example, I'm not interested in Dropshipper 45512's automatically generated web store where he gets a commission to ship you Alibaba goods, and that's really all you get in the long tail of shopping searches. Search engines need to pivot away from helping people find new web sites (since they are mostly crap) and instead help to curate the best content from existing known-good ones.

Yes, it sucks if your new site is legitimitely one of the 0.0001% that are human-made and awesome. Sorry, but I'm not going to find you through search. Don't worry, I'll find you through word of mouth if you are actually high quality.

have you considert duckduckgo with bangs? I use them daily e.g. `!so <query>` would search on stack overflow. U can use `!g` if you ever need google again.