Competition. It’s all about competition between companies. In highly saturated markets ads serve to build brand recognition and are seen as long term investment to gain market share. Good example is TikTok. The social media market is very much saturated and competition very high, so TikTok’s strategy was to buy every ad they could to create brand recognition, which in turn helped gaining market share.

So I don’t think the ad business is a bubble at all, it’s just that the usefulness and function depends on the market a company competes within.

Also if you check your Google Photos privacy settings there is a toggle for “Approximate missing locations” which tells me that Google is most definitely also using private images as training data and not only street view.

I bet what they all have in common is that they all used advertising in order to get to their position.

What kagi can’t fix is that most forums nowadays don’t exist anymore and moved over to discord which is also a big reason for worse search results.

For example I had a technical problem with a device of mine, searched for maybe half an hour on Google until I joined a related Discord. Searching there in the support channel and I found the fix for my problem. Would Discord not exist and all the content be queryable by Google I would have found my answer within seconds.