You're thinking of the generation after

Idk, man. There was a brief period from, maybe 2002 to 2015, when Google search results were somewhat relevant. This was after the late-80s/early-90s, when web crawlers were a crap shoot at best. And the Alta-Vista / Lycos / AOL / Yahoo era where you could get high profile results reliably but everything else was 50% porn-categories on any conceivable topic.

Even at its peak, Google wasn't terribly useful outside of the first 10-20 returns. Bing was a flop, until they poached and functionally rebranded as DuckDuckGo. One of the primary appeals of sites like Reddit stemmed from the community oriented information exchange - you could go to a boutique sub on a particular topic and discover sites and content producers you'd never heard of before. Then those sites would gain prominence and start showing up in search engine queries over time. Wikipedia was, similarly, useful in large part because the information was consistent and reliable from month to month and year to year. One of the better things Wikipedia did was to lock down their bigger topics and limit who could post, if for no other reason than it curbed the "newer is better" impulse of modern web traffic engines.

But gaming search engine queries has always been a thing. Bush's guys figuring out how to get John Kerry's website to show up when you searched for "Waffles" was a thing back in 2004. Or Steve Lener rigging his Albino Blacksheep site to make "French Military Victories" redirect to a message asking if the user was looking for "French Military Defeats". Google-bombing has been around since the firm's inception. Nothing about the above is particularly new or disturbing, save in so far as its a problem these hubs of genius still can't solve.