It used to be nearly impossible to game Google for search engine results and for some reason over the last 8-10 years, its become comical how easy it is to game them for good search results now.
That is because Google realized that there is an optimal compromise between "good search" and "more ad revenue", and that "optimal" is quite far away from "good search". Better than no search, but not by much. In fact, in between searching Wikipeda and simply memorizing/bookmarking the best websites for niche topics, I have stopped using search because the results on the first page are absolutely useless.
