It's tricky to extrapolate from Google. It's fairly obvious that there are things Google could do to fix this problem such as to penalize ads. They are never go

It's tricky to extrapolate from Google. It's fairly obvious that there are things Google could do to fix this problem such as to penalize ads. They are never going to do as long as their main income is those very ads they would need to penalize to address the search engine spam problem. In general, a big part of why Google is struggling so much with search engine spam is that they are such a dominant force in directing web traffic that they're effectively re-shaping the web around them to optimize for their algorithm. If you had any sort of diversity in search, this would be much less of a problem because the economic incentives would be much smaller. I don't think it can be taken for granted that any search ecosystem would struggle in the same way Google has been struggling. I think their SEO-problems is a direct consequence of their monopoly on search and a lack of real competition.