A lot of the time people are either searching for commercial sites looking to buy something or they aren't and these two use cases tend not to overlap. I know personally the vast majority of my searches aren't me looking to buy something but search engines often have trouble picking up on that and end up returning results polluted with sales sites, promos, etc. Unfortunately there are plenty of topics where current context aware search engines fail because it is impossible to gauge context based off of search text in a lot of cases.
Having an option to set the default search to something free of sales sites and similar stuff would massively clean up many of my searches since a significant portion of the net is dedicated to selling people stuff. Then I could just toggle commercial sites back on in cases where I want them.
Maybe even have an option to de-prioritize sites using stuff like referral codes too since they tend to similarly pollute search results and aren't incentivized to write honestly?
I know lenses or the site blacklist option sort of meet that need but you can't currently set lenses as on by default as far as I can tell and I don't have the time to constantly update a lens to catch everything. Ultimately I think this option would clean search results up enough that it should be its own prominent feature. I think user prompted category based searches are a big way alternative search engines can potentially provide better results over more established players.
A small example of people looking for the same thing:
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/106785/does-google-have-a-non-commercial-results-filter
Thanks for your time and I hope anyone reading this has a pleasant week 🙂
