Search without the top 1m (or 100k) sites. Far from perfect, but it tunes out an awful lot of the commerce that Google prioritise. You start finding the old school forums and info sites that are mostly invisible to Google.

Those are a breath of fresh air in this day and age, when 90% of blogs appearing on search are SEO-optimized solopreneur websites that hit you with cookie warnings and "free ebook" email lead gen popups the second you arrive on the page.

On-line, I didn't expect much. Any topic that's highly relevant to regular people is already gamed by advertisers to the extent there's nothing useful to be found on the mainstream Internet. It's all content marketing garbage. For good information, you have to visit places like official government sites, or niche subreddits & web forums.

I dream of the day, but unless the government makes it a requirement I don’t see them doing it as it could undermine their business model to some extent (although I think people who want to buy will make use of the “commercial search”)

If we put on our computer science hats on to attempt an algorithm to classify the "commercial" from "non-commercial", what would that look like?

Distinguishing ads that are disguised as innocent posts vs authentically innocent posts is a very hard problem. What would the AI machine learning rules be?

Let's take one example thread that's currently on the HN front page: "Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?"

(screenshot of HN: https://imgur.com/a/zK5IZ4E)

Was that post submitted for discussion to spur sales of the new Raspberry Pi 4? Or was it a genuine question free of any hidden commercial intent? How would a computer algorithm know? Likewise, how would we, as humans, be able to truly know? To me, the thread doesn't seem like it's advertising-motivated. But do you trust my judgement on this?

Let's take that post's indeterminate status one step further and look at the Google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+do+you+do+with+a+"raspb...

(screenshot of Google: https://imgur.com/a/YGShV9r)

Notice that Google includes that very HN thread in its results. Should the hypothetical "non-commercial" search button include that HN thread or not?

Here's an example of the opposite effect where people misclassify something as commercial when it isn't: A HN user accuses me of selling something[1] even though I actually wasn't! I just happen to view hundreds of videos about entrepreneurship and I keep copious notes. It was easy to share my notes with HN readers. I have no commercial or even personal affiliation with any VC.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12507716 -- "There's so much selling in this post I get tired just by reading it."

I don’t mind the ads, but I do mind the content farms and useless fluff that ends up on the first SERP of a query. Or links to pages with no substantive content related to a query except SEO.

Those days are long gone, since everybody streams now, and genuine user reviews have dried up. Last.fm was another great site, but it's a ghost town now, and the band comments sections are full of spam.

At least rateyourmusic.com is still chugging along.

Far from perfect, but it's been a habit I've been taking more and more in order to avoid all the garbage SEO / Lead Gen / Promotional content out there that's diluting searches.

It's fine to consider it as an extra signal but many people do not realize that reddit accounts can be gamed by marketers for stealth advertising:

https://www.google.com/search?q=sell+old+reddit+accounts+to+...

Caught me slippin'. Reminded me to always use "site:reddit.com" after the search query.

Good old webforums. They are alive and well.

I got back into a video game the other day that was released 15 years ago (also when I first played it). There were plenty of dedicated websites around the game, most of them with forums that contained guides, little details and secrets and whatnot (matter of fact, I ran one of them for a while).

All of those are long gone, with all associated content - which I suppose is not surprising, given its age. However, the issue remains - as interest in a topic dwindles, fewer and fewer people see the point in spending the money and effort to maintain these sites containing (mostly) unbiased information and the information, alongside potentially thousands of user-generated posts/content in the forum, gets lost in the void. If you happen to look something up you saw a decade ago, you might find it on the wayback machine, but certainly not via a search engine.

To be fair I only have experience with old car restoration groups but there may be some FB groups where people post selling / buying things but the real discussion is still in old-school vbulletin style forums.

Well, it would be nice but it's not possible to implement a truly ad-free community at (large) internet scale.

The issue is that a supposed "ad-free zone" of the internet will become an attractive magnet for stealth ads that don't look like obvious ads.

Ad-free zones can work if the community is small and everybody knows each other -- such as an Amish community in a small town. Members can interact without ulterior motives of selling something.

But we can't scale that ad-free ideal all the way up to millions of anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers, webforum members, and website owners. When a community becomes too large, it exceeds the ability of its regular members to trace the money trail of everybody else that's participating in the commercial-free internet zone.

In the end, if you're interacting outside a small circle of trusted friends, you just have to keep your wits about you to hopefully detect hidden agendas of advertising.

https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/clean-links-webe...

Web forums are still great places to engage with real people and real opinions. I'm expecting that web forums will remain after the social media giants are privacy-legislated out of existence.

This isn't new. Social Media is just another channel. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html