Depends what you mean by 'recently', but for me they are much worse than they were several years ago. There was a period when people were complaining and I didn't really see why, but eventually whatever it was caught up with me too. I think it's a combination of losing the battle with SEO spam and prioritising things other than giving me what I actually ask for. There's lots of obvious junk (either 'AI slop' in the truest sense, or the human-written version that was common pre-AI) that finds its way to or near the top of the results; also, it can be difficult and frustrating to convince Google that I'm actually looking for X rather than the superficially similar and more popular Y, and that I would prefer a small number of actually-relevant results to a million irrelevant or sloppy ones.