Agreed. I think the key point here is that the web is a radically different place than it was in 1998 (when Google launched and established the search engine paradigm as we know it). Back then the quality-to-spam ratio was probably much higher, the overall size of the web was certainly much smaller (making scraping the entire thing more tractable), and there were many more self-hosted sources rather than platforms (meaning it was more necessary to rely on inter-linking, and "authoritative domains" weren't as much of a thing). The naive scraping approach was both more crucial and more effective. And in the decades since, it's been a constant war of attrition to keep that model working under more and more adversarial conditions.

So I think that stepping back and re-thinking what a search engine fundamentally is, is a great starting point for disruption.

Additionally, something the OP didn't mention is that ML technologies have progressed dramatically since 1998, and that much of that progress has been done in the open. I can't imagine that not being a force-multiplier for any upstart in this domain.