Both things can be true and you are omitting/ignoring part of my comment about irrelevant results. Higher density of information means I can scan faster and see more with less/no scrolling. As for irrelevant results I called out that the relevant results were above the videos (irrelevant, to me in this context, content). Lastly, I very rarely get ads when doing technical searches so that doesn't really factor in here. I'd wager I get what I want within the first 3-4 results on google reliably (at least when it comes to technical/programming-related searches) and when I don't it's normally super niche (it also rarely has videos or other stuff in the results, think: error messages).

Not the parent poster, but I think there is an important distinction between information density and information relevancy. Google is information dense (compared to this), but not all of it is relevant. This search engine aims for higher relevancy, but the density suffers from the stylistic choices of the creators.

With one dominant search provider, we are constantly conditioned to parse the results from Google. It is very easy to ignore certain parts of the page and mentally process which parts of the page your brain is interested in.

So, while it’s not necessarily “information dense”, finding the information you need is comparatively “cognitively light”. Or at least predictable…

The devil you know…