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I've been wondering for a while now about building a search engine for the ad free web. That is, penalize or outright refuse to index any recognized advertising

I've been wondering for a while now about building a search engine for the ad free web. That is, penalize or outright refuse to index any recognized advertising network, letting through only those sites which don't perform invasive tracking with third party services. Mostly as a curiosity: what would be left? What would rise to the top when you filter all of that out?

aghilmort 5y ago
exploring adding that search / similar as breeze filter at https://breezethat.com/- https://breezethat.com/- not sure can do with curation + bing or google, may have to wait until we bring our scraper out of testing
version_five 5y ago
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.
not2b 5y ago
Wikipedia.
- not2b 5y ago
  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.
randomsilence 5y ago
Check the 'Small or non-commercial Web' search engines on this overview page: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
ephbit 5y ago
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.

aghilmort 5y ago

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

version_five 5y ago

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.

not2b 5y ago

Wikipedia.

not2b 5y ago
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.

randomsilence 5y ago

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

ephbit 5y ago

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.