If altavista, yahoo etc would've had to use their 90ies tech to fight the level of SEO spam that exists today, they would've been terrible, I have no doubt about that. That said, compared to Google today, it wasn't that terrible.

If you knew the right keyword, they'd typically produce somewhat useful results. That's not my current experience with Google. Google will ignore important, distinguishing keywords in multi-word queries, and seems to have given up on ranking content by anything other than link count, i.e. I get plenty of seo garbage in the top 10 that is published on domains with plenty of links. It's why subdomain/folder leasing has been a massive thing for the past two years. The content is typically shit and even the language is on a level that wouldn't pass in middle school, plenty of spinning and templates with few variations, 99% duplicate content from the same domain ranking on two consecutive spots etc.