[ndriscoll]

Most of the apps I use are in fact free, and do not have ads to pay for them. Someone wanted something to exist, so they made it, and then they gave it away for free to everyone because computers are magical and there's no marginal cost to do that. The ad based Internet dying would leave hobby and academic content, significantly cleaning up the signal:noise ratio on the web, which would be great. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to be Google to index it all if it weren't filled with AI generated SEOd blogspam garbage trying to make money from ads.

[MSFT_Edging]

Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.

Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where they might sell a couple products, open source resources built by a community, etc.

I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and unobtrusive.

[JohnFen]

> Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.

Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the web is this sort of site.

[machina_ex_deus]

I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites. Would probably beat Google in many things without any algorithm. Even as blockers don't solve the problem of only getting SEO ad pages, but a search engine which doesn't show any website with ads will automatically filter all the trash.

[ndriscoll]

I've thought something similar for a while now. People say that Google has a harder problem with the SEO industry being so large now and that AI will make it a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but I suspect a decent amount of the problem is just misaligned incentives; if they aggressively penalized sites for having ads, tracking, and affiliate links, they'd be striking directly at the way blogspam funds itself, and there's no need for a cat-and-mouse game.

Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.

[JohnFen]

> I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites.

YES. Not only would I find more pleasant sites, but they'd likely be of higher information quality.

[ryathal]

That search engine would return the same 10 sites for any search.