Can't access search ad-results because it claims goodleadservices is not a private connection

Norton 360 for Mac
1

When I do a search for any topic (e.g., “wood hardness chart”) the search results I get in the ad section all have googleadservices-dot-com inserted at the front of the results. It won’t let me access any of those pages, because firefox (for example) says “We can’t connect to the server at googleadservices” and when diving deeper, Firefox tells me “You are not securely connected to this site”. This happens on all my browsers - firefox, and safari - on my MacBook Pro running Sonoma 14.6.1. I am running AdBlockPlus, but when I turned it off and I still get that error. When I try to go to the URL “googleadservices” directly I get the same error. Very frustrating, I basically can’t do searches. (I am using Norton Safe Search on Firefox, but not on Safari. Doesn’t make a difference in this).

And VPN is OFF, but same results when it’s ON.

2

Actually I found out what’s going on. I tried turning ON VPN, and now I can access all those sites. (I had thought I’d tried it with VPN on, but apparently I hadn’t, sorry for the bad info in my original message).

I noticed that I get the same blocking action when I try to access ANY links in an email message.

The solution is to just run with VPN on all the time. But it makes things so slow… is this the proper action? I know that those sites don’t have encryption on, but it seems like just a warning before I access the site would be good enough, instead of blocking it entirely unless VPN is on.