What is search these days but an ordered list of advertisements matching your keyword
1. It allows alt search engine or alt browser to succeed. So what? The alt search engines and browsers are worse than the google ones. It doesn't benefit any actual people to have them rise up.
2. Google screwed my friend one time. Every single company (and person) on earth is guilty of this. One swallow does not a summer make.
3. Google is restricting this tech I like, or google is sometimes wrong about their bans. See (2)
And so on. I haven't seen anything compelling in this thread, just a whole lot of hyperventilating.
And to your point. No, search is not a wall of ads. But if you feel that way, literally change your search engine. It's easier than typing this comment you just posted.
The events of celebritynetworth.com are a good example of why they've not been behaving as a good citizen (there is a thread about that on this forum).
A good number of people have took up your suggestion and changed their search engine, DDG's traffic count continues to rise. The reality is that many users will use whatever is put in front of them, i.e. how many people use the URL bar of their browser for searches, or use a search toolbar for a specific URL? Google knows this well, hence their paying to be the default search engine choice and paying an amount that no other engine can match.
Google's knows they are the best in class when it comes to general search, but to be sure they have been aggressive in ensuring that no one else gets a look in.
The UK's CMA report estimates that an entrant to the market would require around £20 billion of capital to be a credible alternative, as in, a proper crawling search engine, not a meta search engine like DuckDuckGo. That's before paying the likes of Apple billions of dollars simply so that people will use "what is there".
Having such a dominant position comes with responsibility, which is not solely Google's. The social networks along with Google are essentially the gateways to the web and how they present that information is important- and essentially only one point of view. Having room for more competition, choices, algorithms surely is a good thing.
I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I clicked the first result without really looking (after all, i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time, their money , yet google still made money.
This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to make this better ?
(the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor" cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous 'google® tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)
https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-m...
It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.
As for most of the rest of the first 10, null would have been a valid, more correct and generally better result!
I actually wasted several minutes on one of them right away since I haven't still gotten into the habit of verifying every single Google result to se that it actually is what I asked for and not whatever filler Google decided to use this time. Not that it should be necessary, - they had this sorted back before 2010!
Seriously: why can't Google or DDG get this right anymore?
You didn't buy their product, but Google helped them get your gaze briefly.
What is search but a list of adverts associated with your keywords?