Obviously google was basically already unusable over the past five years but this is... this is something else. Any subject you want to look up will have the first three pages entirely comprised of procedurally generated fake blogs and websites. And there's nothing there. Just scraped text from articles mashed together with varying amounts of hallucinations on top. Not even selling a product, just to harvest ad revenue.
What's maybe even worse is the steady degradation of image searches too. Joe Everyman generates some slop, the image's metadata tags include a historical artist's name. Some one on pinterest pins it while trawling the web. Now there are fifty gooey generated sludge images when you look up the historical painter.
And its not just artists. Historical figures, animals too. Look up 'baby peacock' if you want a clear example of it.
It's a pretty funny bit google, I hope it keeps going.
Reputable sites link to other sites, they form small world graphs that have bridges to other sites. They were primarily useful in early WWW search because sites had narrow focus. Eventually news sites became the hubs, and Wikipedia got mixed in and anyone can edit that, and then things started getting centralized in big forum hosts and news sites started degrading and getting bought and operated by grifters. There were fewer independent sites, blogs, etc, so most of the links just go between "news" and "social media", with a few surviving special interest sites still operating but mostly turned into places that link to news, social media, and Wikipedia. You can kind of get a similar effect between participants in social networks, but there's so much linking to mock/argue that it confuses things.
They are still useful, it just got naturally less useful as they say human activity on the Web evolved. If you run a local spider/index, like YaCy and I assume SearX, you can look at the network graphs showing connections between sites. It's usually a good indicator of the trustworthiness of a page you don't recognize.