Could be. I hope not. We all use search engines, but many forget, it is a service that is paid for as a business model. Nothing is really free, ever. To get the service, we sometime put up with prying, stalking business model mining of our use data. But it is important, to remember it is taking place and evaluate how much privacy one is willing to giver up for a free(?) service.
The search results themselves just plain suck.
This sounds more like this is your problem and not Google. If you have not done so, switch to another search engine to see it the problem follows. If it's a Google problem, I would check my search engine settings in my browser.
I have found clearing browser data (cookies and cache images) helps prevent tracking and other malware. I also learned to stop blindly accepting cookies. Just because a site says they use cookies does mean you have accept them to use the site.
I still use CCleaner after every internet session, sometime during a session. Between that, Firefox, DuckDuckGo and my paid anti-virus, I keep a pretty clean machine.
I have used CC Cleaner as well as a number of cleanup utilities. It's a good program but so are other such products. They seem to do about the same thing, deleting files that are unneeded, invalid registry keys, and other junk that accumulates. Most security packages do a better job of deleting malware.
For Malware, though it has been quite awhile, since any has made it to my system, I like Malwarebytes.
It's always been like that, and any reverse search will be money grabbers except one, a good useful one that I use sucessfully. I'd share it with you by posting it, but you don't believe anything I say and try to sway others to distrust my word by tagging my legitimate posts as fake news, so in my best soup nazis voice:
but cc also accidentally removes bookmarks, at least in my browser and my version of cc, but yeah cc removes more than intrusive iobit.
