They were useful once upon a time I think, but those days are long and gone in my opinion. And they are leeches. They are the prime example of making money off

They were useful once upon a time I think, but those days are long and gone in my opinion. And they are leeches. They are the prime example of making money off of people's data (which is at least one instance of their being parasitic). Maybe back in the day this was acceptable because their search and Gmail benefitted users, but I don't see that anymore. For Gmail, I currently use Gmail because it just happened to be the best e-mail 18 years ago, and it's hard to switch. There's very little about it today that makes it the best. Over the past six years, they've made $755 billion and not a cent paid to people for the use and sell of their data. And all because they provide services like ads above searches and link to shopping websites and Wikipedia, meanwhile selling people's data to whoever? Honestly, it's so hard to use Google as an actual search engine it feels like Google is more like a directory these days. Like, when I have to input a search as: "yes" "i" "really" "want" "to" "search" "these" "terms" something is broken. The only other product of Google that I really use besides their search and Gmail is YouTube, and that's only because it's entrenched. It's pretty adversarial towards, well, everyone except copyright holders.