[hiram112]

100% agree. For technical queries, as long as a StackExchange comes up, Google is still okay.

But for increasingly more basic searches about a product I'm interested in or a medication or anything else non-complicated that would have gotten me a clean list of decent, non-paid results even 5 years, I'm now getting half a page of sponsored BS and then another half a page of 'created content' written by a bot or shyster explicitly for gaming Google's SEO.

Not only has Google lost almost all their good will (i.e. Don't be evil), but their products aren't even that good anymore, at least not so much better than alternatives where the negatives of using Google outweigh the difference in quality.