I'm not joking one bit when I say my Google results were several times more accurate 10 years ago, maybe even 15. Using Google is a chore now. Sketchy SEO is a major reason I hate searching for anything on the Internet these days, but ads and fake content made it downright miserable.
I wonder if we need to abandon the internet as it currently exists as a whole and start over from first principles and license all the software in such a way that prevents shareholders from profiting. After religion, that's the main thing ruining global society at the moment, is shareholder profits.
Internet is a network, that is to say, it's hardware mostly. The content on the internet is shittier than ever, for sure. But, getting rid of the internet involves scrapping trillions of dollars worth of hardware.
I use Brave search because the AI summaries are pretty good (don't come at me), but you could use SearXNG to get a better overview of results. I also really really love using Perplexity.ai, it always gives you sources you can use as points for deeper searching