That too, but I was referring to the sites in the search themselves. They are not independents but in the pay of someone else if they're not generating revenue.
As someone with a commercial digital garden with ads (and a $3/mo sub for the ad-adverse) I like to point out the tension in that whenever possible
Not necessarily. As a counterpoint, I have a site (<https://www.automidiflip.com/>, which I posted to HN on launch 8 years ago[0], which provides a service and does not have (and has never had) any ads whatsoever. (It inserts a reference to automidiflip.com in the MIDIs it creates as a credit, but no ads in the sense that most people mean.)
Granted, it's a niche service, but over the past year it's still been used to flip MIDIs about 23 times a day on average, so it's definitely not unknown. I don't see any need to monetise it, though.