This seems like a common claim here on HN. I would expect the creativity of the world's SEO hackers to outstrip any single team, so I expect you'rer right. But I struggle to find queries where interesting information isn't in the top handful of links.
[badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.
SEO hackers are taking advantage of Google's biggest weakness: they are an advertising company that makes money on search ads.
If search were run by a nonprofit like Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, it could be made to filter out sites with ads on them. SEO hackers would have no way to get their foot in the door unless they drop all of their ads, removing their own revenue source. This would create a space on the internet for non-commercial activity to flourish without ads and all of the tracking garbage that comes with it. A form of cultural ad blocking that, in the long run, could be a lot more effective than the technical arms race of client-side ad blockers.
Searches on highly-specific/technical terms often fail for me. Also, for programming, I often get spammy sites instead of more "official" sources. For your example, the while loop in python, I would expect the official python resource to be first. I find this even worse in other languages.
I would prefer not to see W3Schools, Tutorialpoint or GeeksForGeeks to be so highly ranked. This problem is even worse when I search for ML stuff, with pages upon pages of Medium blogspam.
Recipes are a good example. Not only am I confident that Google isn't providing the most useful or authoritative results, it's easy to see that they have forced authors to morph their content into a terrible cookie cutter format. Scrolljacking, obnoxious ads, and pages upon pages of introductory text are the norm. At this point I often use image search and just guess at how they made it rather than try to slog through the results.
The search AI probably opted out because of your preferences...
I often search error messages, but sometimes I don't find anything and I think to myself: - Am I the only person in the world who got this error!? Or I finally find a forum post and the answer is "just google it"
[badgers in montana], [while loop python], [how to fix noisy refigerator], [nude stallman] all do just fine. Are there veins of queries that are particularly polluted? Even [homeopathy covid] is pretty good.