@chrisisgr8 oh boy, the long downward spiral continues. Commercial interests continue to run rough shot over their user bases in the interest of infinite growth, only to turn their platform into a massive pile of shit. Someone much smarter than me @pluralistic has a great write up about the “enshittification" of online platforms here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
As for search alternatives, https://kagi.com is decent and free up until a point.