Thinking about incentive alignment, non ad-based search would be better than ad-based, but there'd still be misalignment due to the problem of self-promotion. Consider Twitter for example. Writing viral tweets isn't about making money (at least until recently), but the content is even worse than SEO spam. There is also the other side of the problem that our monkey brains don't want content that's good for us in the long run. I would _love_ to see (or make) progress in solving this, but this problem is really hard. I thought about it a lot, and can't see an angle of attack.