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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

> I would pay a massive amount of money for a search engine with a “no commercial results” switch.

Yeah but what does that even mean. How do you define commercial? Who is going to go through all of the pages and categorizing them into commercial and non-commercial? And how do you keep shills and “influencers” from littering your results with seemingly innocent but actually commercial content?

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Agreed that it’s semantically tricky but if you give me a bag of heuristics to work with it’d be worlds better than what we have now.

Keep in mind there is incentive to have a commercial meta tag so that when I’m actually looking for a good or service I’d be able to easily find it (or see the lack of it). The other 99% of the time ads and products are just an annoying distraction and a waste of money to serve.

TBH google kind of sucks for looking for stuff, amazon + reddit recommendations are my main source of surfacing things I want to buy.

Here's an idea : do the 0.1 version by crawling and indexing the web in a perfectly standard way, apply the usual, run-of-the-mill search algorithms, then diff it against the Bing/Google/etc first results which will be biased towards commercial stuff. The higher a page is among their results, the higher the probability that it's commercial in some sense.

So...you want to build a Google except each query starts on the last page of results?

No, it's just a simple heuristic to get started.

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