Comment by sowbug

I'm not sure whether we're disagreeing all that much. Your examples are of low-quality results. From a user's point of view, the one and only job of a search engine is to surface high-quality results, especially if it's hard for the engine to tell.

But the incentive for search engines to pick profitable results over quality results has only gotten stronger over time.

Just imagine a world where your one-person, part-time, labor-of-love guitar-maintenance blog were the top search result, simply because it had the best content. Democratizing access to information was the original promise of the web. I don't think we're there anymore, and I don't think it's correct to let search engines off the hook because their lucrative job has gotten harder.