It's degraded so much that I have to wonder if it's just optimizing for a different set of users. If you do a natural language query for celebrity news, it works really well now.
In 2019, Google Web Search optimised for ~10 billion users.
Expanding self-selected elite groups rarely sustains intelligence and skill levels.
This isn't a swipe at general intelligence, it's just a flat fact of mass media, one that's been widely recognised (though often lamented on a moral basis) for well over a century.
I've labled this "the tyranny of the minimum viable user".
The other factor is that manipulating the medium has become increasingly attractive. That's not just old-school SEO (black or white), but propaganda, psyops, and similar activities. Google are very much part of this battleground, and seem to have taken considerable time coming up to speed with even grasping this. I suspect they're now aware, if not sufficiently competent.
A friend, Woozle, has described this as a fundamental epistemic paradox as systems grow -- what was previously useful for a few becomes increasingly attractive to manipulators. Though Shoshana Zuboff's Three Laws predate their observations by about 30 years.