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.
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=Vietnam+of+compute...
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.
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.
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.
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.