Anybody still using Google should take a deep long look in the mirror. Not for any moral reasons, just a sort of “how much do I enjoy wasting time skipping adds” reason. It’s what made me switch to a different search engine. Because Google is becoming borderline unusable with how far down the actual results are now.
Personally I just use an ad blocker
Why not use another search engine, and still use an adblocker?
Because they are all worse than google in many areas, especially for local results
I’ve tried a couple and they all return worse results on average. Scrolling down past the LLM garbage and paying attention to which results are real is less work than re-querying DDG 4 times to get a decent result.
I haven’t tried kagi, but I’ve heard similar anecdotes here on Lemmy. I’m not opposed to paying. The ad model is unsustainably at best.
So they’re trying to blur the line between ads and real content.
Google results always show an AI answer at the top, at least on mobile.
Very annoying
