I've been noticing this too. I don't even remember what I was researching, but I was looking for "best of" lists like OP and I kept finding affiliate-link farms

I've been noticing this too. I don't even remember what I was researching, but I was looking for "best of" lists like OP and I kept finding affiliate-link farms in all sorts of weird places. One was a recipe site, I think, and I definitely wasn't looking for anything even remotely food related at the time. The root of my problem IMO is that Google never came up with a proper way to search by time. Same problem if you want to search for "new video games" or new anything really. You can't specify it as a time constraint. You have to put the year in as a regular search term, which is super easy for the link farmers to game.