Google was good, actually very good back in 2000s. Their PageRank algorithm practically eliminated spam pages that were simply a list of keywords. Before Google

Google was good, actually very good back in 2000s. Their PageRank algorithm practically eliminated spam pages that were simply a list of keywords. Before Google, those pages came up on the first page of Altavista. I don't specifically remember 2005, but the quality went down with more modern but still shady SEO practices.