Same here. It was one of those relatively small changes, but the realization that I had no real control of a relatively core utility. And that it could be vastly changed (or go away entirely into the great Google graveyard), inspired me to start moving as much as I could to self-hosted stuff or at least find more trustable utilities that I had more control over.

I'll have to give Brave a look, thanks for the recommendation. And agreed. In general, I've been making more of a concerted effort lately to get away from things that are supported via ads. Either making use of open source software when convenient, or moving to paid services. I just hate that insidious feeling of constantly being advertised to.

I've been trying out Kagi lately, a paid search engine. Not sure whether I'll stick with it or not. I do like it though. I've been so tired of pages of pages of ads and nothing else in Google. I've had this inexplicable feeling for years that there's gotta be more internet out there than the ad-ridden SEO hellscape Google shovels on you.