Short and simple response.

> *Advertising in it's current form* is a plague on humanity.

Magazine ads were not highly targeted towards every user that bought one. We liked magazine ads, they were high quality and usually contextually relevant.

Modern advertising is nothing like magazine ads. We don't take screenshots of ads on webpages, print them out, and hang them on our walls like we did with magazine ads.

> Why do you think Google provides you with free searches?

To deliver ads. The same reason Google does everything else.

What would you do without a search engine? Who do you think is going to pay for it?

Pay for Kagi or any other good, paid search engine, which is already superior to Google today?

Right, you get ads, or you pay. Businesses aren't charities.

So the existence of for-pay search engines would disprove the assertion that advertisements are necessary, as there are alternate ways to find information and fund businesses that fetch you that information, without relying on ads.

These are problems unrelated to the topic at hand. We aren't going to solve every bit of this situation in this comment thread.

Who pays for it? Not my problem. I'll use whatever free service exists, there will always be one.

Without a search engine? The internet would fail and targeted ads would cease to exist.

> I'll use whatever free service exists

You'll get advertisements, then.

The reason people turned to ad-blockers is because the ads became too intrusive. They were fine (or at least bearable) when they were just simple text boxes next to your Google search results, or maybe when they were static banner ads. But then the advertisers came up with pop-ups, pop-unders, video ads, 2-hour long ads in the middle of YouTube videos, and all kind of other nasty shenanigans that hijacked your computer and rendered it completely unusable. The advertisers have only themselves to blame for ad-blockers.

You can pay google and get ad free viewing.

I.e. if you don't want ads, you'll need to pay.

> And why do you think that vendors create search-friendly pages? Advertising!

No, Marketing. Advertising is only one form and the most antisocial one. There is a huge difference between making it possible for people interested in your product to find you versus going out of your way to shove your product in front of the eyes of people who are doing something at best tangentially related.

You won't be looking for a product you don't know exists.

You won't be looking for a product you don't need. You will be looking for solutions if you have a need even if you don't know the specific product you need.