1) the anti-capitalist rant is a silly position. That same drive for shareholder value is what brought search from a place of essentially random results during the webcrawler/altavista era to something truly easy to use and useful

2) do you still get good results or not? If its still useful, then its still good. If they make money AT NO COST TO YOU, what exactly is the problem?

3) If google is getting shitty, it will die. Imagine if we did not have a free market system. The government would STILL be making everyone use GovSearch based on Altavista.

4) Google may in fact be worse but not for that reason. I think the results from LLMs are better now.

5) using duck duck go, is just using google. Its a proxy search that removes your PI from the search query