I tried search "how to secure my data". Both my logged-in and incognito desktop sessions return an LLM-powered summary followed by relevant (but doubt if it's high quality) organic search results, but no ads. I failed to get a single ad from this query on any of computing environments that I own. These are the top 3 on my logged-in desktop.

    * 101 Data Protection Tips: How to Protect Your Data (https://www.digitalguardian.com/blog/101-data-protection-tips-how-keep-your-passwords-financial-personal-information-online-safe)
    * Protect Your Personal Information and Data (https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/protect-your-personal-information-and-data)
    * Tips for Securing Your Data (https://www.it.northwestern.edu/security/protect-information/secure-data-tips.html)

So the problem is not something universal but it is also true that we have many data points that proves Google's failure on providing consistent search results across all areas, languages and form factors. As I see more of these kinds of discrepancies, I began to wonder if Google search is actually trying to improve this situation but those developers are somehow isolated within some sort of echo chambers driven by badly defined metrics?

I have no idea which metrics they're using (and it might be sophisticated enough to justify itself), but I imagine that they could optimize it for revenue per ads or whatever so # of total ads actually are decreased but concentrated on very "high value queries" which users actually care about, so the public perception on # of ads is getting worse and worse. And we know that this kind of "feeling" is very hard to capture.