Personally I've felt that useful results have been pretty consistently on the first page for a while, and some of the specialized widgets have even improved that, but over the last ~3 years more and more of that has become an exercise of dodging the ads to find the actual result. Feels like the frog getting boiled.

For me it depends on what I'm searching. For more obscure stuff, I find google better. Sometimes I accidentally use bing (it's a default on one of my machines) and I usually eventually have a "oh right, this isn't Google" moment when I can't find what I'm looking for.

OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad.

Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.