It's almost as if there's a need for a top-level domain to distinguish between commercial organisations and non-profits. This [1] was working brilliantly until everyone decided to abuse it left, right, and center.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com

The worst common day offender being .io.

.io is a generic TLD in most books now anyway. There's lots of other ccTLD that are fairly useless, though it's obvious why ones like .co.ck (the uninhabited Cook Islands) were never picked up as generics.

This would exclude SO (ads) and Wikipedia (accepts payments as donations).

Even of you refined your criteria, what do you have against sites that try to recoup costs of hosting or content? Or, are you referring to completely different sites, lumping them all under "commercial sites" label?

Okay, it seems I was trigger-happy in excluding nonprofits that accept donations. Maybe "accept payments for products or services" would work better? Not sure how to formalize that though.

More generally, I don't have anything against any sites, I'm trying to come up with a way of viewing the internet that would have a high signal to noise ratio. It seems plausible to me that excluding all sites with ads would improve the signal to noise ratio over what we have today. If you think the signal to noise ratio would be improved further by carefully including some sites with ads (SO is a good example), can you take a stab at defining the criteria?

Maybe include only sites whose ads are deemed acceptable by adblock? But then we might include many content farms...

Indeed, the first part (search that filters out site with ads, including affiliate links and the like) is something I wish for frequently. It isn't that I mind seeing ads (I can use AdBlock for that, and sometimes do), it's that I don't want to wade through spam sites when looking for info, and sites with ads seems like an obvious hard filter. Maybe DDG or the like could implement filter.

I remember Yahoo actually had this as a Yahoo Labs thing way back in the day (when they actually did search). You had a slider that would make your results all research (if you are researching a bike) to all commercial (if you want to buy one).

What about sites like amazon that serve both type of content? Reviews for research and an option to buy?

You'd find them half-way on the slider.

"Contains ads" by itself is a pretty bad definition of "commercial site," and will exclude a whole lot of useful, high-quality sites that run ads to pay the hosting bills.

> "Commercial" means the site contains ads

Your idea started out good. Sometimes I want to research a product before I go looking for a merchant. Blocking all sites that contain ads? Just use adblock if you're that fanatical.

Presumably the idea is to define 'commercial' as a website with ads or accept payments, rather than removing sites with ads to increase viewing pleasure.

I think it's a good idea. It'd certainly help with the problem of blogspam etc.

Also, it's not the ads themselves, but sites that produce content for the purpose of serving up more ads. May not be as good theoretically.

I think the idea was that the presence of ads indicates the advertisers had influence on content, which isn't true for a lot of websites which run ads.

I don't think that just because a site makes money it is a bad result. If you searched for "Used Jeep Grand Cherokee" Craigslist would be a good result. So would AutoTrader. Both break your rule.

I agree - such a search engine would not be as general as Google or Yahoo. But in sacrificing generality it might become better at handling certain types of requests. I am sure that given such a service the community of HN will make light work of finding out what they are :)

Also it would by hypocritical that it would block sites with ads but likely have to use ads to generate revenue.

As the owner of a search engine I can tell you search ain't cheap.

Yeah. Also, how do you computationally distinguish between a commercial and non-commercial site? Loads of grey areas.

Our Natural Language / Language Heuristics Engine can do this. We do to a small extent now, we haven't gone whole hog because I'm not sure I agree that commercial sites shouldn't rank. For things we determine to be reference searches we downrank sales pages, for things we determine to be shopping searches we uprank them.

What product are you developing the engine for?

Now everyone is fighting to perfect the concept and the definition.

Bikeshedding I say!

If we're just making something interesting and different, not shooting to replace all search, imperfect definitions are a wonderful place to start.

Would HN be excluded as a commercial site? :)