I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve and that Google is not incentivized to solve. Google wants you to click on ads at the end of the day, full-stop.
Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. Other times I'm looking for a music or a book recommendation with some depth. This of course nearly always leads to SEOd trash. There is no relevance nor is there trust. So, I like others to use keywords like "reddit" or "forum" to get to real humans who I trust and intentions are not to sell via affiliate links.
These issues often lead to the need in finding trust in real human-centered recommendations that stem from real human interests and needs. I've never found an algorithmic solution to this problem. This is why I think college radio stations or those south-of-the-dial end up being so, so much better. And why beer recommendations from your local brew-shop owner are better than anything you can find on the net.
I think building search vertical that are hand-curated would be very interesting to see. But I also think we need to build more communities which allow recommendations to be shared without an incentive to get hits via search and aren't paid for by large corporations and where community impact/quality _is_ incentivized. I do worry that those days may be gone and there are just not may be enough folks (not in tech) willing to spend so much time online and contributing to niche communities. A lot of folks spend much of their time in walled-gardens like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, so it'll be challenging to be sure.