Actually there’s an idea sparking up on me.
When I was a junior programmer there were some business guys coming up with the requirement to implement their own validation language (similar to regex). I always thought it is totally stupid to invent your own instead of using something that already exists. But it turned out to be great fun implementing it. I had no prior knowledge in implementing parsers and interpreters. But man I was so proud after I came up with my own solution for the problem. It was such fun, that I even was doing over hours. At the end I create my own tokenizer, a parser and an interpreter. Even something similar to what I now know most people would call an AST (abstract syntax tree).
However, I know I have bought the Crafting Interpreters book without having read it. I really should start digging into it.
Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.
I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.
On the other side, as a user, I just can’t browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.
But to be honest, I don’t see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can’t pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.
To maybe give you some ideas, have a look at SimpleX and the Nostr. I haven’t looked into it in detail yet, but at first glance these two seem to work similarly.