There's yer problem....
Google isn't interested in helping people find pages with no ads.
Basically, they are turning search into Tiktok. If you try to make a search, you'll notice that now they give precedence to AI overview, Youtube, News stories, Maps, Products, etc. Anything but content.
tl;dr: content is dead in Google search.
I personally use Brave Search and perplexity for those very rare instances when brave search doesn't instantly find what I am looking for. Literally the only thing I (rarely) miss from google is super-deep support for boolean search operators, but then I just tag a !g (exactly like DDG's brilliant bangs) on the end and that works. (I also tried Kagi and did like it, but didn't find compelling differences over Brave Search, especially compared to brave search's excellent and free AI.)
To me, it appears to relate to search
> Pages that are engaging in back button hijacking may be subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions, which can impact the site's performance in Google Search results.
We know perfectly well who they are.
And I've found it so good that I haven't used Google, except by accident, in the past 18 months.
I respect a lot of them, people I respect a lot, and I saw people like Jon Gjengset use it. so I gave it a few months of daily use. I just eventually drifted back to Google. The results weren't better for anything I search for. It felt different, but not better in any measurable way. $10/mo for a different feel is a strange value prop.
DuckDuckGo sits in the same spot for me. I want to like it, and I don't think one company should own web search, but when I need to find something Google finds it first. I wish the answer were different, but that's just how things are.
Thought Kagi would want the strange part to be, say:
"strange to let advertisers cover your monthly search bill, trading your privacy and using Google--we're only ten bucks a month!"
So, pay for peace of mind.
(do recognize $10 is an entire e.g. daily wage for some)