Google search has become so poor, I now use copilot instead of it, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo.

It’s almost like reliving the late 1990s with far more ads, more vanilla websites, and worse search engine quality.

Seems like an intentional move to get more people accustomed to Gemini (or the others)

It's so users run more searches and are exposed to more ads. Google used to firewall the Search development team from the Ads team. That changed, some managers were fired, and now the Ads team can tell the Search team to make changes to how search works to make more ad money. Happened before the current AI era.