We know its possible to do in the Internet of 2004.
The Internet of 2004 no longer exists, the Internet of 2022 is a very different problem for search to solve.
of course, google gets paid to show them, and I don't think anyone here realistically expects google to voluntarily stop intentionally fucking up search results unless it somehow means a larger paycheck to them
Let's face it, the heyday of honest results are just as mythical as the political "good ol' days".
I honestly don't get your snark. Those were the good old days of the Internet, when SEO spam and PageRank wasn't a thing. Then Google came and made the Internet even better, then it turned to shit, and here we are. And web rings were great, you take that back.
So yes, there was a period of time when the Internet was in some ways better than nowadays. Now I'm not saying that everything that happened since is bad, but Internet search and signal-to-noise ratio has definitely fallen off a cliff.
Let's enjoy the good days of siloes and SEO optimization. I doubt it'll get better.
I honestly switched to google from alltheweb and altavista initially because of the easier name and muscle memory taking hold. To this day I believe Altavista was better when google first took off.
