Disclaimer: I’m late to this whole discussion and I also don’t understand some things (I don’t fully understand what SEO is and why it’s bad, though from the comments I understand it’s part of what’s making search engines worse nowadays)

Given that: I also made some searches where I wouldn’t get anything good in the first pages, but that seemed to be dictated by the amount of spam sites too, isn’t it?

I mean, I use the Ublock Origin and NoScript extensions for Firefox and search logged out of Google, so I don’t get advertisements, but I agree that, depending on what I search, I need to fight through large amounts of crap to find something good. Still I don’t understand (and it’s my lack of knowledge in this) why it’s the search engine’s fault for not being the best and hiding spam sites