I think advertisers are just a bunch of big suckers thinking that advertising on these online platforms generates any real business. In all of the years I've been online, I can't think of even one single thing I have bought after seeing an ad generated on a Google platform or Facebook. I still find that a flyer coming to my door showing something on sale that I need is what will motivate me to go and buy something, and unless I am hugely different from most of other people, people spending money on online advertising must be completely wasting their money, with perhaps the exception of a new product to make it known.

As far as I'm concerned, Google has become useless as a search engine; firstly because with so many searches you get page after page of nothing but people wanting to sell you something connected to one word in your search, and secondly because they put it on themselves to manipulate the results to show what they think you should see (just try doing any certs that contains the word vaccine and you will get page after page referring to covid-19 even though that was not in your search). I'm in the process of switching to DuckDuckGo, but I still get some of the same things as described above. I don't have the expertise to do this, but it would be best if people that do would get together and produce an open source browser and search engine that are completely separated from any commercial interests. The same goes for platforms for YouTube and Facebook.