Google decided scale was more important than civility when they positioned text search - Pagerank - as a competitor to curation, rather than as a beneficiary of curation.
We used to have curated content indexes with human moderators guiding them - in print, Yahoo/DMOZ, AOL keywords, web rings, LiveJournal. Those required significant human labor compared to algorithmic text searching, and were not able to scale as rapidly as content creation tools did.
Was that lack of scaling a problem? No, not necessarily. Some percentage of people enjoy curation (thus Pinterest) and we could have celebrated their efforts and given them top billing in search.
Instead, we “democratized” search by harvesting all of those human rankings and feeding them into a machine algorithm that produces seemingly better-than-human results. Unfortunately, in doing so they did not highlight whose curation led to content being shown, and so curation became less popular over time.
Unfortunately, that curation is what led to Pagerank being so valuable. Without it, spam and liars and malicious activities have infected all “search” and “ranking” systems. Without human curation distinguishing “valuable” from “unevaluated”, search does not scale either.
We did society great harm when we sidelined curation, and no amount of machine-learning algorithms will heal that wound.