First, some background. I ran search ads at Google for over a decade, and I could see the inexorable pressure to take up more and more space with ads. It’s one of those things where there's just so much money to be made that people come up with cleverer and cleverer theories to justify why it’s okay.

Another example is Neeva which is a subscription-model based search engine which was founded by former Google execs. Neeva is ad-free and privacy-focused, and allows user to customize search results to their liking.