Google might be deliberately making their search results "worse" (for whatever value of "worse" you prefer), but nobody else is doing all that much better, despite the obvious motivation to do so. I'm a DuckDuckGo user, but I don't think that the results I get are particularly better than Google results.
When people complain about Google, the root cause is usually that the thing they're looking for doesn't exist anywhere on the internet. Spam publishing sometimes drowns out the thing you're looking for, but often that's illusory - if you clicked through every single results page, you still wouldn't find what you're looking for, because it isn't there. A search engine can boost the signal-to-noise ratio in the results that it gives users, but it can't generate signal where none exists. Fixing that problem is altogether more difficult.