Google's quality has been slipping drastically, even for legitimate non political searches. If you do any programming and have to search for errors, you'll find lots of spam pages that are completely useless on the first page. I have no doubt Google is hand curating results, but black hat SEO and manipulating results by other websites has gotten out of hand. Google used to work really hard to prevent that from happening and they're instead focusing on less important things. It's as if they have lost a lot of their talented search engineers and they've been replaced by people who are more worried about making new doodles for the home page. Actually, speaking of this, I actually recall Google doing something about stack overflow and breaking their system to penalize them because they were dominating the results. Google went from "don't be evil" to evil and inept. It's a big combo and it's sort of sad how a leader in search has fallen like this. I used to use startpage.com and I stopped because the search results just aren't that good anymore.