Believe it or not, but at one point Google (and similarly many of the products that it owns now, like YouTube) did not have ads in them either…

I am okay with adding ads to them though, to help support future product development. And likewise contributing packages delivered as open source, ofc I am happy with that.

I just do not like watching products, like Google search, lose out on services, not b/c of traditional ads but rather the newer style of ads in the form of SEO, i.e. not “ads” so much as “misinformation”, which Google made far too easy to game the system with as compared to the previous incarnation, where it was based more on “reputation” e.g. linking to & from other sites. Though similar to ads in that it is a way for companies to promote themselves, jumping straight to the front of the line rather than play “fair”.

Nowadays you can zoom in on Google maps and not see the store you are looking for until you are practically on top of it or manage to click it directly - instead Google prioritizes what it wants to show you, based on who ponies up what amount of dough to Google, rather than what you as the customer want to see.

And as for AI, it simply was not ready. It was itself an advertisement to executives from people trying to sell it before having made a viable product yet. Thus I am not surprised that they lost billions due to mismanagement of this highly interesting and promising field, that will eventually offer everyone a great deal, one day.