You just have to look at Google's profit motive here. Their motive isn't to provide quality search results. Their motive is to show users ads, either in the sea

You just have to look at Google's profit motive here. Their motive isn't to provide quality search results. Their motive is to show users ads, either in the search results themselves or on the destination sites via their ad network. The SEO spam sites aren't a bug, they are a feature of Google's profit algorithm. Google's search quality will never improve so long as their motivation is to show you ads. Why should it? Competition may help here, either by an outsider like the OP suggests, or via breaking Google up with anti-trust enforcement, or both (my preference). As a user, your best personal and ethical move is to install an ad-blocker, to make ad-based business models less viable, which will help promote business models that don't abuse the customer.