How on earth does paying for a service mean someone's "being taken advantage of"? You do realize that Google, Bing et al aren't actually free? The whole problem with eg. Google is the fact that they're an ad company with a search engine and not the other way around, which creates perverse incentives to show you bullshit results as long as it means more ad views for them (and they control both the supply and demand side of that ad network, which makes it even worse). That's literally the reason why Google's results have gotten so bad.

While I'd love to live in an economic system where people could just build good web search engines for free and on a volunteer basis, unfortunately we don't find ourselves in such a system at this time. I'd rather pay for a search service than use one that's incentivized to not show me what I'm searching for, and I'd also rather pay for developer time than assume that they'll work on services for free during their time off (which is the reality with eg. Lemmy admins)

I don't have a ton of experience with it yet, but I don't have to scroll through a bunch of actual ads, followed by a bunch of not-really-but-basically-still ads, before finding what I'm looking for.

I'm paying for the service, not because I just fell for their marketing, but because I actually have the impression of getting noticeably less "polluted" results, especially when searching for something easily advertisable (e.g. "best X to buy 2023"). I don't need to convert anyone else. Everyone can just try it themselves and judge whether they feel it's worth their money or not. As of now, for me it seems to be the case.