There was a time before SEO slop that web search was really valuable

We're fighting slop with condensed slop

Before Google the web was already full of SEO slop. Except "SEO" just meant "put a list of popular keywords in a block hidden with CSS". That was the time of Altavista and other search engines.

So the time you're talking about is a window when Google existed, but before they gave up on fighting spam.