Your logic makes no sense. Just because something is worse relative to how it used to be does not mean alternatives are now better than it.

It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.

I recently tried Kagi again after not being particularly impressed 2-3 years ago. Swapped it to default after a week. For me it works better than Google probably 80% of the time now.

Google also did 100% make search worse on purpose as this great piece discusses: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Doctorow goes into greater detail on how Google purposely worsened Google search in his book Enshittification. It’s a very thorough chapter and it’s clear what they did. They were chasing “engagement hacks.”