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Funny, with Google you typically want to add "-best" to your searches to cut down on SEO spam.

Interesting, I had never heard of this tip before. How do you do this though? Do you just add it at the end like a flag? (e.g. "sparking water -best" ?) In general, I thought these kinds of search engine commands were being phased out, but it looks to me like it would filter out those garbage articles that would bring up results like "top/best 15 brands of sparkling water" etc.

That still works on Google. You can put it anywhere in the query. The "-" is a negation operator that tells the engine to exclude results containing the following word.

They've actually apparently introduced a few new operators since the old days, which I found surprising. For example, $ for prices, # for hashtags, and .. for ranges of numbers. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

I often do the opposite: "best [search query, usually a product] in the world".

You'll likely get the opposite

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