The results were probably never perfect, but in the last 2-6 years search results have become blantly manipulated...searching for pretty much any political topic (and even other topics) always yields articles from NYT, WaPo as well as 'fact checkers' which are all spreading blatant propaganda and falsehoods.
In the same time they've nornalized mass censorship on major social media platforms where a large amount of (particualrly political) speech occurs nowadays (that in itself is a big problem), to the point of having an uncensored rival's servers pulled.
I've also seen dissident blogs hosted on WordPress and Blogger get shut down.
I haven't used Google to find anything political or really much else since 2016. I kind of assumed everyone had noticed this by now.
I had stopped using google altogether some years ago. But google does still work better for factual non-political research, finding books etc. so I use it for that.