If this was to become popular I suspect it would be overflown with SEO garbage just like Google. I guess that means we can use it while it lasts.
But sure, even if that would happen, I have an ace up my sleeve. An devastating and incredibly simple way of limiting spam, which is to go for the wallet and de-rank sites for having ads.
Google could and would never do that, of course, because they are selling the same ads. It would undermine their entire business model. This conflict of interest is the core of Google's search engine spam problems.
It seems that you're talking about de-ranking the fat middle of the curve which serves the banal content consumed by those in the fat middle themselves, leaving only the tail end, theoretically serving the corresponding tail end of content consumers, which might approximate the early days of the internet before the normies invaded, before the barrier to entry was lowered such that it approached zero.
It could work.
Today they don't just have legal concerns, they arguably have to worry about regulation as well.
But also... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/commi...
You could even have pre-made open source lists. Basically ublock origin for SEO crap.
In a very real sense, it only happens because it's being allowed to happen.
Can this extension solve your problem?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
Google doesn't have any countermeasures against a lot of what we consider spam and generally user-hostile.
Google could at least try to detect spammy recipes by for example detecting certain keywords (likelihood of it being a recipe) and then downranking it based on length, with the idea that if we're confident it's a recipe it should be short and to the point, and anyone telling their life story on it can go to hell.
Google could detect listicles similarly.
Yes, this can all be gamed, and I will expect there to be an arms race, but it will at least raise the bar and make spam content costlier to produce and require constant maintenance as Google's algorithms get better. Yet, right now, Google isn't even trying any of this, and why would they? Spam typically has ads and/or analytics on it, both which can be Google's and thus benefit them. Why would they ever expend extra engineering effort (thus money) to ultimately earn less money if they're successful?
In addition, the ultimate counter-attack to profit-motivated spam would be to just detect & downrank what gets them paid - ads, affiliate links or analytics, as I explained in previous comments such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434317. All of those often require things that would make them trivially detectable, whether it's ads that must be a third-party script so the ad network can detect fraud, affiliate links which ultimately must lead to a large affiliate domain such as Amazon and sometimes mandate legal disclosures that can be detected, or analytics that likewise rely on a third-party script.
They can always offer it as an option that the user must explicitly opt-in, that way nothing is forced onto the users (yet everyone will enable it pretty quickly if the results end up better).
Might fall within refusal-to-deal (which is fairly nebulous concept), especially given they are also in the advertisement business. Anything that could be interpreted as blocking search results with competing ads to their own might come under scrutiny.