This seems unrealistic. Sliding the commercial slider to zero is unlikely what anyone wants. Even Wikipedia would be hidden due to its incessant thirst for donations. Visiting a nice open source repo that happens to have Patreon or GitHub sponsor? Gone. Visiting the help page for a hardware product I've already purchased? That page probably upsells you on a higher tier product and is gone. Trying to get news? All news sites have ads now and they are gone; the only ones without ads are those paid for by Big Oil or Big Pharma or similar with a hidden agenda to influence you.

Instead of bending the web into something it is not, have you tried simply visiting a library and getting all information from there?

God i detest that attitude: all software sucks because it makes assumptions instead of as many options for the user as possible.

Yes. IMO ideally a good program isn't basic and easy to use for McNormie as it is functionally composable, like groups and algebras.

There’s a simple reason there’s so much SEO spam: Adsense.

Maximizing ad profit on search traffic necessitates more paid ads, both on search results page and the web pages. They won’t say that directly of course but that’s what we’ve seen play out over last 20 years.

Vague metrics like “good user experience” get trumped by hard metrics like total $ / search.

One blind spot I missed: advertising and telemetry activity are to count strongly in the commercial score.

When I slide the Commercial slider to zero, only web pages which there are no obvious detectable ways for the host or author to make money from showing me the page should be returned.

Bad behavior stems from the drive to make money. Make a search where it is impossible to make money by being a result in the search (especially if a Commercial slider is slid to low or zero).

> bad behavior stems from the drive to make money

“The only moral income is my income”

It’s definitely an interesting POV. A lot of the way Google works comes from the fact that people use Google at the moment they’ve already decided they want to buy something. Versus say Instagram where you might see ads but you haven’t decided to buy something and then use Instagram. It comes down to what people other than you are using search engines for.

> A lot of the way Google works comes from the fact that people use Google at the moment they’ve already decided they want to buy something.

It is exactly the point at which returning sponsored links maximally screws the user over.

> A lot of the way Google works comes from the fact that people use Google at the moment they’ve already decided they want to buy something

You missed a key part of the comment:

> Offer the user a commercial activity slider. […] if a Commercial slider is slid to low or zero

> The best way to stop SEO is to build a bot which detects commercial activity on the page (and/or availability of cart/payment controls), and commercial language in the text of the page (does the content look like an ad or product/sales page).

Thanks for describing the detection algorithm, I will now design my spam sites to defeat it.

This is how SEO works. There are no silver bullets.

I guess you could make a spam site that didn’t have affiliate links, advertisements, or marketing text… but why bother with the spam?

All you can do is poison my results with garbage which won't make you money, which means you are paying out to do that.

What do you mean? My pages will return obfuscated JS (or WASM) that render into regular-looking commercial features and links, but only if you have applicable headers. So you need a highly sophisticated visual analysis engine, with potentially multiple spoofed Header passes per page, to catch anything. Doesn't sound cheap to scale.

That's an excellent point ! I had contemplating a need to build a search engine that only returns results from webpages with no trackers or ads.

The presence of affiliate links should be the biggest indicator that the information provided is going to be heavily financially incentivized (ie. bad).

Would be much simpler to calculate and detect. I would be super surprised if Google's algorithm doesn't already know how to detect affiliate links.

I argue ANY money making mechanisms or language need to be detected and contribute to the commercial score.

When I am looking up baking recipes or paleontology text on T-Rex, that should not be a commercial[izable] activity. Full stop! Commercial activity is like sexual activity in this specific regard: it's unwanted! 98% of my searches are for information that autists would pour their hearts into for free out of love, and that commercial interests will only detract from (such as pirated content and software cracks... lol wut did u xpect hm?). If I could pass a law which bled webmasters and search engines dry in fines until something like this is set up... I would! (Elect me BDFL of the world.)

Many high quality youtube videos on e.g. wristwatch repair have lots (sometimes dozens) affiliate links to every tool used, which is just an additional way for the author to make some money. If your search engine filters this out, it's worthless.

While you might like and trust these youtube creators, incentives drive everything.

It's downright silly to believe these creators won't behave rationally, given those incentives (eg. lean more and more toward pushing products with the highest affiliate payouts).

I've observed this myself in pretty much any niche I follow. Every youtuber/creator eventually devolves into an affiliate shill, no matter how honest and high quality their content is at the beginning.

If you're getting paid when you say something is good, you're not trustworthy. Period. What's funny is we all used to understand this! The internet broke everyone's brain.