I remember when they introduced ads and it was jarring. After switching to DDG about a year ago, it’s very frustrating to try to interpret google results of I’m ever presented with them.

I have to do this mental dance: * are these ad links? * are these knowledge graph links? * how many results did I get?

It is a bit tiring.

a few years ago i resisted switching to DDG because google was still noticeably better in many ways in terms of search results; the balance has been shifting significantly since, and i use DDG for over half my searches at this point. the main downsides are less 'magic' when using very vague descriptions as queries, and more spam domains. but the image search is easily much better at this point.