There are two possibilities:

1. Search engines are getting less good at ranking bad content below good content

2. The good content is getting worse. So bad, in fact, that it looks like bad content.

It may be a little of both. I lean towards 2, though. It’s kind of a race to the bottom in terms of jamming your page with ads, buzz words, and popups these days.

Generally speaking, the web doesn’t have great results for e.g. product recommendations. Part of it is because of how centralized the internet has become.

The best you can do a lot of the time is to just serve mostly Reddit results. But even that can be gamed.