I hear this criticism a lot and I always wonder whether that has something to do with either me not having a Google account and thus using the unpersonalized search, or simply with what I search for, but Google is almost always giving me worse results that DDG or, for that matter, any of the smaller competitors.
Google seems to be filled with sponsored results that are only superficially relevant, and from page 2 onwards, it sometimes feels like whatever it’s giving me isn’t related to my search at all. Even when I’m very specific with my query, using +/- and quoted phrases.