I haven't found that, but even if that is true, it saves you tons of time having to filter out all the sponsored results and get to the things that actually give you the information you where searching for.
That's not my experience, but I guess that depends on the use case and how specific things you are searching. However, in general I much prefer good search results to saving a few seconds and getting delivered absolute rubbish like google does these days, that was the main point of my post. Like I said I still remember when just plain google search without any thought on how to word the search was phenomenal.
Google fully pivoted from prestigious tech-company to lame ad-company and that's a shame really. Business as usual.