I reckon there's a surprisingly simple solution: build a search engine that penalises pages containing adverts. If a page is heavily manipulating SEO to get your attention, you can bet it is loaded with adverts. If you built an anti-advert search engine you'd be competing with pretty much no-one, because all the search startups are chasing their cut of the multi-billion dollar advertising market and/or buying in SEO-infected results from one of the big existing search engines. The difficulty of course would be finding an alternate funding model that could scale, because building a search engine isn't cheap or easy.
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Sounds like a good way to get tons of websites with covertly sponsored content eg. affiliate links or paid/shill reviews.
So you fixed this problem with your simple solution. Now you've created another one: how do you make sure the people who write content can do so while putting bread on the table.
A classic dilemma. Collegial vs commercial ecosystems. Amateur sports face this. You can't really make a living running ultra marathons, which makes it somewhat exclusive, but if there was a lot of money to be made the whole experience would change and not always for the better.
I'm sure there would still be plenty of advertising based search engines for them to advertise their content in. See also the high street vs library analogy - if you had great public libraries you wouldn't be putting shopkeepers out of business.
Is it really a problem though? Was there a lack of content in the times before the commercial Internet (or the Internet itself really.. in the time of BBSes)?
And there are things like Patreon as well..
Yes. That’s why piracy was a big draw for BBSes.
Apart from HN, which sites would that engine crawl?
Every other site on the net seems to sell you something.
Would you allow Wikipedia even though it tries to make you donate via those popup-like dialogs that slide in from the top?
Why would you even want to search all the sites that are trying to sell you something when you're simply looking for some information? Putting it in pre-internet terms, it'd be like walking down the high street looking at shop windows to try to answer a question rather than going into a library to look it up in a book. Wikipedia isn't trying to sell you something - with the high street vs library analogy its more like a book than a shop.
> Why would you even want to search all the sites that are trying to sell you something when you're simply looking for some information?
Answering the question online is a means to an end. The 'answer' is the top of a marketing funnel that's designed to make you familiar with the answerer's product/service and sign up, or post a link to their article on your Twitter.
Look at it the other way around. If you were a cat owner, how much of your free time would you spend answering questions about their dietary restrictions?
Simple, but incredibly hard to do.