These days, search results are all weighted, especially on app stores, so you'd end up with everyone playing Among Us and never finding games like Predynastic Egypt or King of Dragon Pass.
I really do think there’s a gap in the modern web for discovering stuff like this. Google only wants to show you what social networks and major entities have for your query, and SEO spam buries everything else.
In a place where everyone can start an app-store, people will need to carve out their niche. People could then start hand-curated appstores. For a niche. Put together with care and effort.
A little like-f-droid, but much more common and therefore covering a lot more niches. A "christian appstore", "socialist appstore", "appstore for old phones" and so on.
Kindof like the old "manually-created" indexes, but for modern times, in which phones are the primary gateway to the internet.
The top search result has 9 (!) ads, mentions the book, but butchers everything that makes the recipe good. It shows rave reviews and a rating of 4.8. It probably is better than what everyone's mom taught them, and better compared to a generic tin can sauce. But I think the old school algorithm of "best selling cookbook" does better.
Try looking for other heavily SEO-ed things and it's even more hopeless: weight loss, business advice, games.
I was thinking the other day about non-demand TV and radio, and how it was obviously worse in many ways than what we have now. But I spent many a happy afternoon watching a movie or classic TV show that I'd never heard of because I had no options, and really enjoyed myself.
Back in the day, you'd have your Simpsons and Power Rangers and just learn to enjoy it and talk about it with all your friends.
I think algorithms are built wrong too. We'd probably click on some show with a sexy model, or a rom-com twist on a zombie flick, or some reality cooking show with celebrities, or a gritty remake of a children's show. We don't really intend to watch it. But they pique curiousity and a little disgust. The algorithms register these clicks and long views as an "interest", and gives us more of these clickbait-ish shows.
I think what would work is simply narrowed down genres, say, Animation > Children > Horror (e.g. Adventure Time) or Animation > Adult > Tragicomedy (e.g. BoJack Horseman). Past that, just arrange at random, alphabetically, and not even by popularity.
Yeah this was really obvious to me in some of their Marvel stuff. Overall enjoyable enough, but only if I binged it while doing something else. Pacing and a lot of dead air time was otherwise a huge problem.