> I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for
This is one of the things I love about google as a user. Googling "what is my ip" or "how many inches in a meter" used to require you to visit some random website filled to the brim with ads.
This was the social contract of the web. You give google free content , they give you back money through adsense. Google broke it, and went overly greedy.
If enough websites band together (incl. wikipedia), they could boycott google and force it to pay them per search click or sth. It's only fair . Google is exploiting a system in their own advantage and to the detriment of others. This is no longer win-win.
Awesome. Now try it at a client's off-site location with hardware and terminal locked down by someone else's IT department while you're trying to troubleshoot their connection.
Sure, it's a good command to know, but completely apropos of nothing. A command line alias is not at all an alternative to typing "what's my IP" into google, something that even my mom could do.
You don't have to see ads to not want to visit places that inundate others with them. Also, having an ad blocker should not give you the false impression that you aren't seeing ads on the web.
Yes, I do because I prefer compensating content creators, because otherwise we will not have many of those. If some website has shitty ads (blinking banners, auto-playing videos, malware etc), I just avoid those sites altogether.
Since you seem to be someone who doesn't see ads on the web, I am curious to know how you pay for the content you consume? I have come across very few non-ads options which work well. For me, subscription fatigue sets in across various video-on-demand sites and various high-quality newspapers. But for a lot of my family / friends across the globe, subscription charges are high enough that they would rather see ads.
I try my best to contribute for things I care about. I'll send the occaisionally donation into the guardian, ETF, Patron for a youtuber, wikipedia, or whatever. I do have a couple subscriptions like for Spotify or the economist, but otherwise I try to give to stick to donations whenever I feel like I have money to burn.
That being said, I live with the fact that certain content creators get nothing from me, I don't feel great about it but I would never consume their content if I had to go through ads, either.
Its funny to note that many people here complain about Google preventing page views, but have no restraint in doing the same by blocking ads. Pot meet kettle...
Google is a search monopoly. Republishing search results to keep users on Google (rather than the publisher) is literally stealing content and the pageviews the content generated.
As a user, blocking programmatic ads (such as those served by ad marketplaces) is the only way to browse the web safely.
Websites are free to use affiliate links, subscriptions, donations, non-marketplace ads, or any other safe monetization strategy. I will not apologize for blocking the unsafe monetization strategies.
This is one of the things I love about google as a user. Googling "what is my ip" or "how many inches in a meter" used to require you to visit some random website filled to the brim with ads.