Agreed. It actually is pretty awful now. Unfortunately, I still find it better than the alternatives (chiefly Bing/DDG). Every time I want to try out DDG, I just find it doesn't quite get what I want either, and Google does just a bit better.

Try https://www.startpage.com/, https://search.brave.com/, https://kagi.com/ or https://github.com/searxng/searxng.

You.com used to have really good search, but it looks like they have veered off into the AI chat space instead.

searxng is a self hostable meta search engine that allows you to basically just use the best search engines and easily switch between them.

You should give kagi a whirl I rarely need to go past page 1 or even the first result for most queries.