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.
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.