I think the advertising needs to be stripped from the company and that element broken into at least three competitors in the ad serving space. Google can make money on their cloud services and whatever else they’re working on.

But the conflict of interest is: they are incentivized to serve search results that drive ad revenue back to themselves. That, in combo with their near monopoly position, makes them bad for society.

To get decent Google results now, I have to use the advanced search and set the timeframe to pre-2020. And then, much to my surprise, it works pretty well. The internet broke during COVID – the combination of everyone being shut in absorbing their social media echo chambers and LLMs and other generative content means you can’t find shit. And Google is specifically enabling and encouraging this.

KDE Plasma recently added a once-annually notification requesting donations to the KDE e.V. (who pay for things like server infrastructure to support the project). Is this past your line, or acceptable?