When was this decade? Navigator came out in 1994. By 2004, the web was fully commercialized.
Even government sites are ad free, non-profit, non-commercial by their very nature.
In 2004, before modern-class smartphones, before endless smaller companies even had a web presence, before facebook was a big thing, there was still mostly ad-free, commercial free content.
And I should add here, paying for a computer and internet link at home, or paying for a server in a datacentre, or buying a pre-configured wordpress site, without ads, are all commerical free endeavours.
Otherwise, nothing was ever commerical free, because everyone always paid for resources to provide content in some way.
Paying for resources, does not make a thing commerical.
You and I have a very different view of the past. Were you on the web pre-2000? I ask, because I don't understand the difference in our opinions.
As people aren't okay with having to actively looking for content (anymore), this has been relegated to Facebook/Discord/Telegram/WhatsApp/etc. Groups. You either are bombarded with ads or pay with your metadata.
My earliest post I can find on Usenet was from 1993.
Yeah I learned a lot from comp.lang.c. But there really wasn’t that much of value for research. Sure there was tidbits and ftp Mac archive sites for shareware.
There were endless free sites, without advertising, back in the day. Many were people installing apache, and putting simple html/text pages up.
Free content outnumbered anything commerical for a decade, including blog spam.
Altavista being bad at filtering, is not relevant, becuase you're stating the problem, which gave rise to google.
People could no longer find valid content, due to a tiny number of bad actors.