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Like most people, I get fed up with search results that assume I'm automatically looking for something to buy. I'd love to be able to run a search that only turned up pages without any advertising or sales orientation.

Does Google have a switch/option to do this? If not, bearing in mind that it would effectively ban pages that carried Google ads too, would they ever be likely to do so? (They could still have their advertising on the search results page)

Is this pie in the sky? I'd imagine that the quality of results for such searches would dramatically improve.

I should add, I wouldn't be looking to strip advertising out of a page. I'd be looking for websites whose raison d'etre isn't the immediate selling of a product. For example, I might be looking for the history of a company, rather than to buy the product it sells.

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This is late but you might try Swisscows. I was experimenting with it vs. Google using a registered trademark (DirectCore) and it seems Swisscows shows the trademark and other "organic" non-shopping results first, then the shopping results. Google doesn't show the registered trademark until 4th page. Qwant and Bing weren't any better, DuckDuckGo had the trademark on the 2nd page but still showed shopping results first.

If Google has a non-shopping switch, I could not find it yet. The current wisdom seems to be to use filtering, for example in the DirectCore search, something like:

-Rio DirectCore

would avoid most of the shopping results (in this case, fishing line).

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No, Google doesn't have anything like that, nor would the sites that it indexes want that. They want you to buy their stuff.

You may be able to achieve something close to what you want with some negation searches. Try keeping out phrases that you're likely to find on e-commerce pages.

Focusing your search to the information you do want will also help.

green widgets specifications -"add to cart" -"purchase" -"checkout" -"add to basket"

You can, of course, also exclude certain sites from your search.

green widgets -site:amazon.com -site:overstock.com
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  • A related question: Is there a way to have Google searches automatically use parameters like those? There are numerous filters and settings that I'd like to use semi-permanently, but I haven't found a way to do that. (I assume it would need to be a Chrome extension.)
    – BevansDesign
    Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 17:07
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Another solution using google search operators is this:

site:edu OR site:gov OR site:org

I'm not sure how you would know what sites are trying to sell you stuff besides the domain extension. There are alot of domain extentions that you CAN create a commercial site on, so if you limit your search to the ones that you know cannot, like .edu you might have some luck.

I just discovered that the .org extension no longer guarantees that the site will be non-commercial.

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