> Turns out fighting spam is expensive, easier to just do a combo of boosting really big sites and blessed spammers that use your ad network.

Plus based on the results it’s not entirely clear that only the ad part are ads. Especially around certain topics where money is involved, the Google first page is often showing companies that could profit from traffic

Well, right, a separate problem is that some notable amount of Google's revenue comes from fooling people into thinking that ads are "natural" search results. To include an extortion racket where you have to pay for ad placement for your own exact company and product names so competitors don't get ads-masquerading-as-results placed above you. Plus this is a super-helpful feature to scammers, like it's basically scam enablement trust-laundering as a service. If we had a functioning government and market guardrails the FTC would have been all over them for this many years ago, besides which they'd long ago have been broken up into several separate companies and denied a bunch of the acquisitions they've performed.