You're making good points. I just think that whatever the funding trade-offs of search engines may be, there cannot be a solution that doesn't also rely on users discriminating based on usability.

If users choose Google today, it's either because of inertia or because they find that Google's organic search results are worth sifting through a page of ads.

This is unlike other aspects like privacy where users may not fully understand the consequences of their actions.

Any historical examples of monopolies that have not been abused?

I thought they purchased indexs off of Yandex to get started? Surely they must also maintain their own crawlers and indexes as well now.

> DDG's revenue also comes from ads. They might claim that they want to do right by users, but when serving ads the incentive is to optimize those ads to make more money.

I find this a red herring. Ads have never been a problem, the ecosystem around them is the problem.

> What the US government should do is to introduce privacy laws that disallows user profiling for the purpose of serving ads. The GDPR in the EU is a step in the right direction.

This is overly specific; user profiling is also used in recommendations and to develop aggressive and optimized marketing strategies. One of the problem of "Big Tech surveillance" in not what they know about you, but that they know so much about everyone that they can model your behavior/response with little information. (which for example is what happened with Cambridge Analytica)

> The US government should also demand for those ads to be more clearly marked as being ads via color clues.

This feel a lot like micromanaging.

DDG doesn't use user profiling to serve ads.