Source Forge encourages people to write reviews of software products. While I was once a strong Google evangelist, I'm not anymore, so I reviewed Google.:
"Google is now a paid-ad search, not a data search"
Edited 2022-02-02 (Moderated: pending)Pros: It used to be very useful and still can be at times. Google used to base its catalog on relevant data found in the Web site, and this is still true in some subject areas.
Cons: Paid ads and Wikipedia references can dominate search results in some subject areas and are sometimes irrelevant to the search. Google is practically useless for finding travel information. Sites like Tripadvisor and booking.com buy so many ads for so many tourist sites, a casual user might think the only way to visit certain areas is to go through third party sites.
Overall: For the last few years, Google has been putting paid ads and Wikpedia over actual search results. While I have been a daily user of Google for over 20 years, I'm going to use other search engines in the future. Google search results page should have three columns - one for actual results based on page content, one for ad-based results and one for Wikipedia.
