It really is terrible. I was a DDG early adopter and then Kagi. It’s been a while since Google has been my daily driver, but I do sometimes use it and the results are just bad. There’s so much spam and the results page is a mess. To my eyes, Google is worse than either Kagi or DDG in just about every way except speed. The only other thing I can really think of where Google is much better is in local search. They are damn good at that.