Most of the time when I search for something, I sort by more seeders first. Some type of signature can be used too.
I see 100 (!) results for that movie's name. 49 of them have zero seeders at all. I don't know what even is the point. 29 of the results have one seeder. So already, 78% of the results are pure crap.
Let's look at the top result with 338 seeders: File is 3GB, H.264 video, 1080p, but with a crappy stereo AAC audio encoding... arrggh why??
Number 2 result with 84 seeders: 1.43GB, H.264 video, 720p, no word on the quality of the audio encoding. Even more worthless.
Number 3 result with 17 seeders: HEVC format, 2160p, audio streams include TrueHD Atmos 7.1, DTS-HD, Dolby Digital 5.1, stereo, and three non-English language streams. But, with an eye-watering download size of 61GB. Holy shit! Nice, but wow, what a download.
You have to go a few more down the list to find a good balance of high quality video and audio encoding, but with a reasonable file size. By that point you're in the single digit number of seeders.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a few choices and quality trade-offs. I guess there's someone out there who doesn't care about the stereo audio because they watch their movies with laptop speakers. But 100 results, with the vast majority of them either unseeded, poorly-seeded, or flawed in some way. I agree with OP: You definitely want some curation, not just search!
Because you are vastly overestimating how much most people actually notice or care about this.
Stereo doesn't imply low fidelity. Just as 7.1 Dolby Unobtainium doesn't imply high fidelity speakers.
0 seeders now doesn't mean forever. Some seeders only hook to the network once in a while, long enough for a few leechers to fetch it all. If the content is in demand enough then a few seeders may be left and suddenly a 0 seeder search result becomes an attractive one. Even curating is complicated for the human eye, so good luck automating that.
Sometimes disconnect from site seeder count is bigger, and say 1 seeder mentioned is actually 15. But that was never rarbg's case, it was reliable and dependable like no other similar service. It also had IMBD rating so I could quickly weed out not so great stuff and focus on well rated ones, it generated maybe 60-80 movies a day with my filter applied, so quite a stream. After 2 week vacation, catching up took some time.
I used to, including today, to just go there every day or two and check whats new with my predefined filter. Often great movies that I never heard about before, old and new alike, took 2 mins to get 1080p x265 variant. Glad I've still managed to download that highly rated turkish movie this morning.
But this couldn't be easier to game. All you have to do to be a seed is to report that you are a seed. You don't even have to send any data.