I cancelled back on the first price hike they did. Just wasn’t enough for the handful of times I used it per year. They had me at the point where I kinda didn’t care I was paying, but the price hike gave me a wake up call. Since then they’ve continued to up the prices and I’ve continued to not give a shit. Netflix originally won me back from bothering to pirate stuff cause it was so good and easy, now the opposite is true in the streaming space.

Google screwed up like a lot of companies do. YouTube was never profitable to run. They were just burning through cash to keep the lights on and become the number one video host online.

Internally there became a mandate to try and turn it into a profit making machine and the advertisers caught wind so they stepped in with their demands knowing that they were going to be the source of the profits. This is where the content restrictions started to happen as videos needed to become ad friendly.

I wish YouTube would have figured out another path to help provide the service and pay video creators. At least with Premium you don’t get ads and Sponsor Skip means you don’t see embedded VPN and game sponsors.

I think Hotbot did that back in the 90’s, and it’s relaunched (well, the name and domain have been put to use again) as a privacy focused search that combines an AI style question/answer style system as well as traditional link list result. https://www.hotbot.com

I’d recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I’ve heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I’d recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it’s fucking awful for delivering useful links.