The cynical view about search quality is that the metric being optimized for is not how satisfied people are with the results, but the amount of ads and therefore revenue earned. Search results only need to be good enough to get you to come back and not worse than the competition.

I wish Google had a subscription option (with actual support) that eliminated all ads across their products. Imagine Amazon's customer obsession with Google tech... I'm sure it would do well for the 4 years they would support it.