I've seen that recently after watching part of a YouTube video about something and thinking oh this is crap, I'll find some written article - only to start reading the exact same thing a few seconds later on an apparently unrelated blog.
The "What’s Causing the Decline?" portion completely ignores cause #1: Gaming your Google ranking is a key element in dropshipping and similar shady businesses. It's hard to keep your search accurate, when there's millions to be made if you successfully break the search and get your snakeoil to the top
I can't say I have any real problems with it, though I do use adblock.
Given the "95.32% share on mobile and 81.95% on desktop" I presume it works for other people too. I have to admit when I see the "Google is dying" articles I read it as people like moaning about everything rather than it's actually dying. I see since the first of those links it's died itself to another $500m in market cap and will probably keep dying in that manner.
That said I do find Perplexity better for some stuff.
I actually haven't seen it recently, so they may have removed it, but I'm still annoyed by whoever decided to have those "people also searched for" etc. boxes appear a few seconds after the page loads, leading to me accidentally clicking them.
It's one of those anti-features I cannot imagine even a malicious reason for. It's not like doing that was profitable, it's just really annoying.
I have no idea how that even got launched, but thankfully, it seems to have disappeared now. When I see a feature like that roll out, it really makes me question the decision-making at the company.
I can filter out ads. What is a bummer is the lack of relevance for many search results. Is there a search engine that returns more relevant search results?
If you are willing to pay for it, I've been using Kagi for more than a year and usually my old Google-fu techniques work 95% of the time to find what I want (using "quoted text", - operands, etc.).
Search is probably my most used service on the web, paying for it felt weird in the beginning after so many years of "free" search but given how bad Google has been when I compare the same query in both I have completely accepted that it's worth the price, have been a very happy customer.
