I've thought about something similar, basically "the good internet" that would be a hand curated list of sites that are not there just as a pretext for ads. I think a lot of software project documentation qualifies, lots of stuff on university sites like lectures notes for example. I assume that across different niches there is other stuff like this. I think the key would be something that can't be gamed, like it has to be legitimate content that is online for an existing purpose and not as a pretext.

Check the 'Small or non-commercial Web' search engines on this overview page: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

This approach reminds me of YACY even though it's only somewhat related.

Instances of the engine indexing locally on the machine where a user is browsing the web.

I'm regularly reminded of this concept of a distributed search index, but at the moment it doesn't seem very likely that it'll gain traction.

exploring adding that search / similar as breeze filter at https://breezethat.com/- not sure can do with curation + bing or google, may have to wait until we bring our scraper out of testing

Wikipedia.

Evidently someone disagrees, but no ads or trackers except on the home page and its pages rank highly on current search engines, so if you exclude trackers and ads that's what you're going to get.