Well, one could claim that indeed their ranking function does not work well - at least recently. Stuff that is relevant rarely is showing up on the first page as it is losing to various spam sites having articles written by AI so that it can match the typed search query and get a good ranking, but articles themselves being misleading and incorrect.
I remember the days when you could really dig deep into results pages. Maybe not 34557, but above 100 you could get niche human written content on the interesting topic.
Yeah, I used to pretty frequently click through, and find relevant/useful content, some 20+ pages in on paginated web search results. Well, unfortunately the major search engines have changed their functionality such that there's usually no point in even looking beyond a couple pages (or, arguably, even looking at the first page for that matter).
