That sounds about right. I haven't used Google search is half a decade. Same with chrome.

There are so many better services out there today I'm surprised Google is still something people use

I think ads were never paid by the dished out links, but by the actual opens. sometimes even only by the click on it (impression vs click).

consumers are not willing to pay for ad free plans

I guess that, ironically, they don't advertize them well enough.

While a noble effort, voting with your wallet means that those with the biggest wallets get their way.

We need legislation. We need us to be in power, and to put an end to capitalism superseding our democracy.

In the words of Mark Carney addressing the European Parliament a few days ago (and I paraphrase):

"We believe in a strong economy, not as a goal in itself, but as a means to create a good democratic society."

Yeah, Disney's origin story is as shitty as Apples: business man screws his creative partner, expunges him from the company's origin story, and declares himself the true visionary.

That's my problem with DDG too, unless the query makes sense for the US it outputs mostly garbage. They don't handle localization very well, or at all.

No, it's not just you. DDG hasn't been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it's been excellent. It's what I recommend now.

It's not free, but I'll gladly pay to ensure that I'm the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.

I've been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn't give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.

Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary ("search assist" is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn't query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the "more results" button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.

Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg ("!ne 16gb crucial ram") and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.

Main problem with "paid" is that you have to log in for searching = all your searches can be tied to your payment into / identity. That's a big no-no.