Google search was actually great between the period where pagerank successfully defeated old-school SEO tactics and banner advertising starting earning enough that the "bloggers" could pay cheap writers to pad their articles in convincing ways.
2006 was the first year I remember paid blog posts appearing from content farms that would exist only to increase your inbound links and page rank. Those days companies were paying cents per post to get their sites to #1 in Google while Google just wagged their finger and said "naughty, naughty."
Since around 2012. What year would be the golden age of google search? I wonder if anyone has archived search result pages for relatively timeless queries so that we could compare. Wayback Machine seems to archive some of them.
It used to be SO much less likely to return junk.