The last time I tried to find a plumber in my local area through google I realized that the first three pages of results contained zero actual results. It was a mix of ads and seo spam from scammers. I ended up going to ddg and while there was plenty of seo spam there too, I found several good results on the first two pages.

Google has the technology and talent to relaunch themselves in a leadership position, but the current executive team doesn’t seem to have what it takes. They’re custodians / accountants, running the company a bit like Microsoft in the Ballmer era. What google needs to do now is leap ahead, and I don’t see it happening without a leadership change.

Amen. I have basically stopped using Google at this point because, when I do, the results are all garbage. I ask GPT-4 the same questions and get reliable mostly accurate answers. You do have to be cautious of lies/hallucinations but realistically most of Google's results now adays are sales pages masked as helpful articles that are mostly full of crap anyway.