At the time, they gave better results and the clean and simple design got right to it without all of the BANNER! BANNER! HONK!HONK! of the competitors.
They had ads, but they were just text links that said they were ads and weren’t playing games with rankings based on who bribed them.
My biggest issue with this whole debacle is that the non-profit board hasn’t clearly explained itself to the pubic or its employees. There’s an ethics discussion that absolutely positively needs to happen and there needs to be some sort of governance in place around a myriad legal and moral issues from copyright to displacing human jobs and that can’t happen right now because we still don’t know what the fuck the board was trying to accomplish.
I’m all for responsible stewards of AI, but I don’t think this board is it. They’ve cut themselves out of any future governance ability in any event.