I don't think I have used ask.com in the past (perhaps many years ago though), but now I am becoming increasingly troubled here - does this mean we depend even more on google search? And it constantly gets worse too. That's concerning. We need some real alternatives that don't just suddenly vanish.

https://search.brave.com

There are alternatives that dont depend on Google, like duckduckgo but the results are still not as good in more specific questions (in my experience)

https://kagi.com/