Google has mixed its search ads between and throughout the organic (free) search results starting sometime mid-last year. Google calls it dynamic ad placement, and it is an ongoing tests. In fact, Google had to change its definition of top ads to make way for this historically very unGoogle-like move.
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
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.