I remember distinctly when someone introduced Google (ca 1999) to me as an Altavista alternative where the good results were actually on the first page. As in, with Altavista you needed to rummage through the first couple pages (luckily back then you only had a couple pages' worth of results) to find what you were looking for.

Maybe what we miss is not exactly Altavista but a mid-2000s Google, also with the low occurrence of spam and sponsored content that we had back then. How about duckduckgo, does it fit the bill?