Curation-as-a-service could even become a viable market. It's arguably already happening to a certain extent through various platforms, creators, and aggregators; but it's not really split off as its own service yet.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources.
Maybe page rank (mentioned in a sibling response) helped address this, but then it’s really no longer just a dumb grep.
A simple "-site:somesite.com" removes those, or just scroll past them. Keyword spam is easy to ignore because the title of the page, the domain, or the path often has nothing to do with what you're searching for, and the preview text is nonsensical.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for users to ignore the crap and find what they're looking for, even if it's not the first result. The "smart" omission of results has the effect of removing a lot of useful ones too. Google's claims that they have X number of results for a search is essentially meaningless if you can't actually see them all.
If you really believe that, maybe it is a nice startup opportunity for you :)
It's ironic that, in trying to make search "human friendly", Google has also succeeded in giving it all the negative traits of a human --- the "human" that is more like a commissioned salesperson.
I know the argument is that humans frequently make mistakes so "we should just show them what we think they wanted", but that's just opening the door for manipulation.
Search was much better when it was closer to a "grep the Internet". IMHO machines should remain "dumb" (for lack of a better adjective) and leave the important decisions to the users, keeping the latter in control.