> For example, consider going full anti-BS. Basically, any whiff of attempting to manipulate search hits, or stealing/republishing content, or using generative AI is considered a strong signal for low quality, punishable by search engine death sentence.

We are doing something like this at Kagi search.

While it is difficult to detect each of these on their own, what is easy to detect is the purpose of the web page if it has advertising on it (and most of these pages exist for the purpose of monetizing low quality content). So we downrank ad-filled pages in our results. It is a simple but effective method for filtering out low quality content.