How conceptually could a paid search engine solve the problem of SEO and spam? (Curation seems economically infeasible?)
Is what you're actually proposing ad-free search results? (I'd be willing to pay Google approximately $0.01 per search for this. I suspect this is probably more than they get from anything but the most expensive ads (pharma ads that confused old people will click on).)
What I would really love is a browsing-assistance agent based on something like an LLM that can summarize and de-cruft search results for me and show me content extracted from web pages in a standard format without any Javascript. (I don't need an LLM to be the arbiter of truth, I just want it to be good at summarizing documents.)
(Because Google is so wedded to the ad ecosystem I'm not sure I trust them to be the steward of technology that is basically about removing ads from my life.)