I’m not sure how it would all work out. But let’s start where we are now with search engines.

Remove the ads and make people pay to use them beyond some number of queries a month. This alone gets rid of the problem of the platform intentionally shoving ads down your throat.

Find a shitty website that SEO’d it’s way to the top and got through the cat and mouse game? Then allow people to blacklist websites so they stop appearing in results. Then as the provider investigate and downrank sites that people downrank and block often.

Maybe also preferentially treat companies that don’t load their own sites with other people’s ads and tracking scripts. Oh and tell the user how many of those trackers exist on the site.

This obviously don’t solve the problem of companies pushing ads onto you. But it:

1. Sets up your information provider to not be the biggest and worse ad pusher of them all.

2. It gives people the tools to start penalizing bad content and ads and to outright block them from their results.

This alone, I strongly believe, would be a great improvement.

Google used to (like, fifteen years ago) go to enormous lengths to break or cripple any kind of SEO - unpredictably revising their algorithm, hand-reviewing sites, and other things that they wouldn't even admit to or hint about (for fear of giving the nascent SEO "industry" a moment of ascendency). There was a brief time in the early teens when the received wisdom was that "SEO doesn't work".

Maybe they still do all that, but I'm not convinced. I see so many transparently SEO-ified sites at the top of search results that I regularly think "I wouldn't have seen that in 2008".

I recently switched to Kagi, and it does most of the things I talk about above. I don’t stumble into SEO crab very often anymore. And when I do, I instantly black hole it.

They recently rolled out a leaderboard where you can see the top sites people block, downrank, uprank, and pin to the top. Extremely useful.

This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.

Regardless of current issues with Reddit's business model, it does seem to have been particularly successful as a US/English repository of product knowledge, despite not having any specific strategies to deal with the problems you mention above.

> This is an unreasonable set of goals, given that the current system (advertising) fails to avoid any of these issues.

The proposal that I responded to wanted a system where a consumer can express their desire for a product or service given the problem and that you get back results that don't have the smell of advertising. Put differently, these aspects I enumerated ARE attributes of advertising that the proposal seeks to eliminate.

I actually didn’t require it to stop looking like current advertising. I merely wish for a system in which you come to companies telling them what problem you want and listen to what they have to say.

This is opposed to the current system where they are constantly trying to barge into your life.

It’s about pulling in information when you want it versus having it pushed onto you. See my reply to your other comment.

I really believe I have a good idea for this question[1]. There is no reason advertising couldn't be nagging me to do things I want to be nagged into doing anyway. But damn, the actual work to disrupt such an entrenched snakepit of self-justification is daunting. I don't think it's at all impossible to build something much better, just really hard to get the necessary mindshare from an industry built on taking mindshare.

[1] https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/making-advertisin...