What do you mean by "In my circle of friends googles search engine is pretty much useless"
I mean that artists are unironically using bing as a better alternative for image searches, academics have gone back to tracking citations + libgen/scihub to find information and programmers are using duck duck go to debug their code.
This is a huge problem since these people used to be the core of googles search user base.
I can't help but think that we are seeing the google transition to late 90s microsoft now.