Google was always an ad driven company. Google Adsense was kind of a big deal there for a while.
Once they started letting money affect their search results, especially with promoted / sponsored results, everything started going downhill.
It used to be that nobody went to the second page of google search (because the first page almost always had the result you needed), but now, the first page is almost entirely ads and paid content.
It’s not the advertising part of Google that ruined it, because that part has always been there. It’s the greedy executives that shoehorned ads into every other product and service possible, and are now cramming “AI” down everyone’s throat, trying to make us all dependent on it, so they can rugpull it and charge us for access.
Google was always an ad driven company. Google Adsense was kind of a big deal there for a while.
Once they started letting money affect their search results, especially with promoted / sponsored results, everything started going downhill.
It used to be that nobody went to the second page of google search (because the first page almost always had the result you needed), but now, the first page is almost entirely ads and paid content.
It’s not the advertising part of Google that ruined it, because that part has always been there. It’s the greedy executives that shoehorned ads into every other product and service possible, and are now cramming “AI” down everyone’s throat, trying to make us all dependent on it, so they can rugpull it and charge us for access.