It's absolutely worse today, how much worse depends on how far back you go.
Before 2005 Google didn't put ads in search results, AdWords results were separated off to the right side of the page to make them clearly distinct from organic search results.
These things aren't all true in real life, and on the internet it's even easier to fake all of that.
In the beginning Google went by 'amount of text' (which is why you read everybody's life story on how they had sex next to a magma flow in Hawaii which created the idea of doing burnt ends on a pizza stone), references (remember all those backlinks which would boost your page). Credentials are a lot harder to track. There is no API at my school where you can put in my name and see my credentials (and all you'd see is 'we got governments subsidies for this person, which is why we let him pass').
And all of this worked at the start. Knowledgeable people naturally had references on the web, as only knowledgeable people were on the web.
Now we literally have people writing text purely to make it look like their website has more content on them, even if it is remotely related to what they serve.
Great example, even posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400
Or any coding problem where you end up on logrocket / some partitioning app / some generated website with which has an 'answer' for KB0000000 -> KB9999999...
the ability to make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation.
Now instead of 5 sites with identical recipes, what about 500? 5,000? 5,000,000? How can you even rank them in a meaningful way and does it matter to the end user?
There will be too much of a supply of information, especially when ai ramps up, that no one website will have unique value outside of local significance or if it was made by your mom or someone you like. I think it will be crazy to see what the web looks like 10 years from now. It could be vastly different.
Why are top 10 results for 'apply for visa to Moldova' a scam? Is it really impossible to give government officials an ability to provide input for official business, like applying for a passport?
Could you not hire like 2 people in each makor country to keep track of websites for important government services?
Could you not take community input like reddit does, or wikipedia?
seriously sometimes i think the people making the smartest algorythms are tge ones with biggest tonnel vision, and are incapable of examining alternative solutions.
Lets take your problem. Applying for a visa for Moldova. Let's say that there's a site hosted at visa.moldova.gov with a form to apply.
Eventually, someone is going to integrate a bunch of data broker services to auto-fill that form, then data broker to other tourism related businesses trying to compete to plan your stay.
It is very much in their interest to ensure that no one sees visa.moldova.gov, but instead sees one of their onboarding funnels.
Thus the well around a well known onboarding point to a critical government service is poisoned.
The problem never was or will be Search. The problem is advertisers hijacking the verb of "Search" to weight it for those willing to pay.
Librarians and archivists have had search solved for the last century. The only people who have a problem with that implementation are the ones who want to convince you the answer you're looking for is them.
Google has a conflict of interest here: on the one hand their users need information, but on the other Google is the primary vendor of advertisements on these garbage clickbait sites. It would not surprise me if Google intentionally upweighted results that have their ads in them, and they certainly are not downweighting them the way Kagi does.
For instance, Google product search results would likely be greatly improved by always showing relevant reddit posts first. But this would last a very short amount of time until reddit would be completely drowned in junk. (I've seen people argue that this is already the case, but searching reddit still tends to work well for the products I search for)
We can be happy that Google search hasn't gone this way, and as a Kagi user you should be glad that it's not a more popular engine, as the quality of results likely highly depend on that just fact.
In a way the ads-filled product search results are better, because at least they're honestly trying to sell you the product you are searching for rather than making fake comparison sites pretending to be genuine content.
This is already a thing under Google's system: if a result isn't an ad-ridden mess, it's content marketing trying to sell an adjacent product.
You haven't addressed the conflict of interest that Google has as the largest vendor of ads on the internet. Right now, Kagi's sole job is to help me find what I'm looking for. If SEO started to game their current algorithm, the incentive would be for Kagi to improve their algorithm and win the meta game. If they fail to do so, their payments will dry up as people look for an engine that will.
Google has no such incentive. If their algorithms consistently drive traffic to pages that have their ads on them, Google is incentivized to keep that traffic flowing, regardless of how SEO'd the content is. The user isn't Google's customer, the advertiser is.
If they start popping up in Kagis result they will bother me at most two or three times before I hit the downrank or block button and they are gone.
Why Google hasn't managed to create something similar during the last two decades I leave as an exercise for the reader.
In what universe can for-profit behavior be trusted or accepted at face value as genuine? Also, maybe I'm using it Wrong™, but I don't use general search engines to look for products. I'm not shopping all the time, so why should we be advertised to all the time? I use a blocker and aggressively eradicate ads from my experiences, precisely because they are useless to me, take up valuable screen real estate and bandwidth, and are security and privacy vulnerabilities.
It wasn't so bad back when it was just a JPG and a link, but the telemetry that gets baked into it is creepy as well. For-profit Internet behavior needs to rein in its snooping if it wants to gain trust.
You know, things like the fusionauth OAuth guides (not trying to call them out).
I ask because it's a weird area where it can be shit and predatory, or a general good thing.
Now any imaginable niche subject is drowned by a deluge of blogspam articles.
Interesting people moved behind walled gardens because who is going to bother building a webpage when you can just post a pic or 140 characters on a whim and move on with life.
I was about to give up but these to have given me hope that search isn't unsolvable.