There's disincentives for Google to do the right thing, for sure, e.g., ignoring quotation marks. I assume this is so that you never see a blank page (and so a

There's disincentives for Google to do the right thing, for sure, e.g., ignoring quotation marks. I assume this is so that you never see a blank page (and so ads can be shown, which would be weird to see if there were no other results). But, as the author mentioned, a lot of the problem is the inauthentic content on the internet that Google must sift through and filter. What makes Reddit still not half-bad (although this quality is under direct attack by brigading and troll farms) is that you have user-generated, user-curated content and a not-too-bad voting system. In this context, I think a future iteration on search engines will be hand-curated results, under actual human-curated topics (rather than fuzzy machine-learning-inferred ones). Think of a huge directed acyclic graph of topics that goes down twelve levels or more in some cases. If you have enough people involved in this kind of crowd-sourcing, I think it can be made to work. A challenge that arises in this context is how to prioritize content added to the wiki search engine by good contributors, and deprioritize content added by the content farms. I think this can be managed with a combination of well-conceived reputation management and providing users the ability to specify other users (people who seem trustworthy and whose tastes are solid) whose preferences will then be used to weight search results.