Then maybe you might be interested in Marginalia Search https://search.marginalia.nu/
I just tried it (with a query relevant to something of interest to me) and the results are interesting, very technical, which is what I want.
I have tried it before, but it appears to me that it dismisses all commercial content altogether, which is not what I want. That is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
For example, I searched for "The Vietnam of computer science" (Without the quotes) and it returned zero results.
Isn't it? You want to downrank for ads and downrank for paywalls. How is commercial content supposed to be funded?
> Isn't it?
Of course not. Appearing lower in the results than non-monetised content is very different from not appearing in the results at all.
> How is commercial content supposed to be funded?
They'll find a way. After all, if more people turn to ChatGPT for queries than to search engines, those sites are under the same sink-or-swim pressure that they would be under if demonetised search engines were dominant.
I'd say it's only technically different unless there are only a handful of results. It probably might as well not appear in results if it's past the twentieth position. On Google, click through rate is already down to ~1% by the tenth result.
If a site doesn’t appear on a Google results page, it dies. If a site doesn’t appear on your results page, people switch back to Google to search for it.
As a new search engine you’re going to be faced with this sort of thing for a long time before users begin to trust you. If a user actually wants to find a commercial site but simply can’t, they’re not going to stick around for long.
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=Vietnam+of+compute...
I did a couple of other searches and realised the website I expected to be indexed, sortitoutsi.net, was not.
Nonetheless, even without that specific website in the index the results were truly bad.