I’m in Norway, and I tried the first search “rema 1000” without getting any spam results on the first two pages…

That doesn’t entirely eliminate the other possibilities though, google search isn’t deterministic, and the domain could have been reported since the article went up.

It's not showing for the example search (Rema 1000) for me right now, but I did a search yesterday, about a person/company and the result was news related content, and ended up with a site with the same image. However I can't find havfruen (mermaid) in my browser history so they must use other domains as well.

I'm in France and shearched for the how often thing, it returned themermaid on second page

I tried four of the queries from Germany using a private window. 3 returned results from themermaid on the first page.

In particular, the only results ranking higher than themermaid for "hvor ofte oppdaterer apple ios" are those coming from support.apple.com.

It is not happening with the example from the article for me, but I have seen this practice ruin my search results in varying degree over the past 6 months. Some times entire keywords will just be broken because there are so many fake sites.

Can confirm this is not malware, Google has a huge spam problem, see my previous comments.