Good point. Do you find that other search engines like Kagi resolve the issue?

I tried Kagi and liked it. I also find using 'verbatim' searches on Google helps, although that seems to be broken more and more often.

Brave search is better than Google or bing or duckduckgo, I find. About equivalent to kagi.

For alternatives to Google here is a graphical network of web search engines and proxies: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ (desktop display only)

I feel like everything has turned into the blogospam that recipe blogs are known for. I searched the other day for how to use github's personal access tokens. The first 4 results are all unhelpful blogspam. Pages and pages of text talking about personal access tokens. No details on how to use it. Not a single snippet of command line, nothing.

Ugh, I can see it now: How to use virtual environments with jupyter lab. Before going into the details of this tutorial, let me tell you about the first time I ever used a computer. My father was working as a travelling shoe salesmen at the time...

Not to mention half the first page results are sponsored ads

If the content is there but is not accessible (findable) then it may as well not be there. The Internet is content farms and SEO spam strictly because that's what can be found and accessed by the overwhelming majority of people. A non-indexed blog or site, or one that is sufficiently low on the results list, may as well not exist. It's like farting when you're home alone. You farted but nobody but you gets to enjoy the intestinal perfume.