Google has gone downhill for a while now. I've moved to DuckDuckGo a few years ago and I find myself using the !g shortcut less and less. It used to be that you'd get better, more specific results with Google but the opposite is true now; I'm pretty sure they now optimize for more generic results and optimize for spoken input, and the past year the degradation has only worsened like you said. I think it makes sense to use it less and wait for someone new to do it right again. Weird parallel, but I just saw a video on Battlebits, which is a shooter game whose entire existence is to take only the good parts of 2009-ish Battlefield and CoD (but mostly Battlefield). Those games have in the past years become such cash grabbing garbage that a game that does almost nothing but reset the clock is now one of the most played games on Steam. I feel like we're gonna need that for search engines. (And then some.)