Earlier quoted context omitted.
My search results were a lot better in 2006 when, I assume, they didn't have all these ML pipelines...
My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, SEO manipulators. They didn't find a way to cleanly excise that spam, so they resorted to a very imperfect hammer...giving a lot of SEO weight to large corporate entities. So basically, a different kind of spam dominates now.
They downranked pirated content results in 2018[1] so someone could just use pagerank and include those sites and have a better search engine for that sort of content. There's also the "controversial twiddler"[2] which makes Google only present mainstream opinions on various topics. I had to search yandex.com to even find a good article on it. There's some weird stuff on the Youtube blacklist, like the Las Vegas mass shooting from a few years ago that everyone forgot about that they never figured out the motive for. See the leaked "YouTube Blacklist" under the "Censorship" link in the project veritas article.[2]
[1]https://fossbytes.com/google-downranks-65000-torrent-sites-i...
[2]https://www.projectveritas.com/news/google-machine-learning-...