[timwis]

What perplexes me is how these sites make it to the _front page._ Isn't ranking heavily informed by the number of sites that link to the page in question, and the reputation of those sites? I would imagine that the only sites linking to these spam pages are other spam sites run by the same owner (and, of course, google.com), which themselves should have low reputations. Does "exact match" really outweigh reputation scores that much?

[agmater]

In high competitive keywords, yes. But these sites don't have backlinks (https://i.imgur.com/9ka6yV1.png). So if you wanted to beat them you either write new content that matches the search intent (like OP) or you find good backlinks.

[Aeolun]

What else would you expect? Searching for an exact match and getting wildly different results has been known to inflame some passions.