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.
The only reason Google is still my default search engine on desktop is …. dates.
I’m a dev and the date next to each search result helps me skip a ton of irrelevant links and get to the ones that most likely apply to my situation. DDG and other search engines usually don’t show any dates.
I’ve sent feedback to DDG on this but obviously that had no impact. If they add dates, I’m done with Google.
On mobile I still use DDG since my searches are generally not date specific.
DDG shows dates if you use the date-sorting feature
Personally I just use an ad blocker
So they’re trying to blur the line between ads and real content.
Haven’t been using Google search in a long while and shifted completely to DDG. For me DDG gave straightforward and accurate results. If people want Google results they can try SearXng too. There’s Brave search as well.