If a search for something like "crane hook design principles" returns a page with "buy crane hook design principles for less" at the top, it is wrong. And wronger than the wrong of a librarian because it's not even trying to be correct, just thrown out there for the edge case. We just happen to write it off as "that's just Google".
Is that what it shows you? I just searched for that exact thing. The first two were ISO standards, the third wikipedia, and the fourth a paper on crane hook stress analysis.
Not as good as a directed search by a professional, sure (and I haven't actually looked at any of those papers, so who knows how relevant they actually are), but my experience seems a lot better than what you're implying.
If you followed either of the links to ISO, you would have found that they are offerings to sell the standards. The technical information is behind a paywall. That's ISO's business model. The link to Wikipedia is about cranes in general.
If a librarian said "the answer will cost you $181 (CHF 178,00)" or "here is a book about cranes" we would probably agree these high quality agree even if we might disagree over their being wrong. Nevermind that ISO standards are not necessarily a good set of design principles because minimum requirements are not the same as design tradeoffs.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Surely the most useful measure of "wrong" is whether the user comes away with the correct answer?
Adverts on a webpage might definitely make it less likely that a user comes away with that answer, but I don't think they'd invalidate a user's successful result any more than gossiping with the librarian would invalidate their help if they successfully find an answer.
The advertisements are noise. SEO also produces noise. At some point the signal is lost. Google's business model is built on maximizing the amount of noise a user will tolerate whenever the user in hope that the user stops searching and starts shopping. If you search for a book, Amazon will appear before the Wikipedia page.
Nobody contested your argument, specific knowledge of niches s still fairly scarce on the net, at least if looking for gratis information. OTOh a well sorted library supplies books that cost a fortune, so google couldn't be replace that, at least not yet.
