The internet runs on advertising, and that includes search engines. Google brought in $26 billion of search revenue in the most recent quarter alone. As that business has grown, it's reshaped what search looks like. Year after year, ads have gobbled up more space on its results pages, pushing organic results further out of view. Which is why using Ghostery's new ad-free search engine and desktop browser, even in their pre-beta form, feels at once like a throwback to a simpler internet and a glimpse of a future where browsing that puts results ahead of revenue is once again possible.

In privacy-focused, anti-establishment corners of the internet, going open source can earn you a certain amount of street cred. It signals that you not only have nothing to hide, but also welcome the rest of the world to help make your project better. For Ghostery though, the company that makes Edward Snowden's recommended ad blocker, publishing all its code on GitHub Thursday also means clearing up some confusion about its past. Before Ghostery was acquired last year by Cliqz, a privacy-focused web browser, the company's revenue scheme invited some skepticism. Ghostery made money when users opted-in to share data about what kinds of ad trackers they encountered across on the web.

Most ad blockers--and there are so, so many of them now--operate roughly the same way, comparing the scripts they encounter on a given site to their whitelist and block list letting the former run and stopping the others. This means they largely share the same drawback, as well; they can't block what they've never seen before. With its latest release, popular ad blocker Ghostery attempts to solve that common dilemma, with a fashionable solution: artificial intelligence. With Ghostery 8, available Wednesday as an extension for all the major browsers, the popular ad-blocker introduces not only AI-powered anti-tracking technology, but also a new "Smart Mode" that adjusts settings for you, rather than expecting novices to know which trackers to toggle. In doing so, the Edward Snowden-endorsed service has become both more accessible to the average user, and better able to preemptively protect them. The power-up comes at an auspicious time.