After repeatedly updating user styles to remove that box from my google search results, I gave up and moved to Bing. The result quality has been great and the result pages are much better (less wikipedia-link-hiding than google). Plus I get tens of dollars in gift cards a year.
Yeah. I swear Google has been burying Wikipedia as hard as it possibly can. Most of the top so-called "organic" results nowadays are commercial sites full of ads. Every year, Google squeezes more value out of their search engine at the expense of users. In the long run this should open the door for competitors to build a better product.
Personally, I want to see an open source search engine. The world desperately needs community-run search that helps users find real information and real communities while filtering out all of the spam and other commercial garbage that has been gradually strangling the web over the past two decades and a bit.
I think some of the pieces are already in place to do this. Community-run blacklists for plugins like uBlock Origin are comprehensive and well-maintained. A repository of crawled pages is already available from Common Crawl [1]. What we need is a search engine that makes use of these resources to index and rank results so that pages without ads and without obnoxious heavy Javascript are pushed to the top of the results page. Ideally, this engine would allow users to run NoScript and have a really smooth experience searching for and browsing clean sites without having to add stuff to their whitelist all the time.
I think that blacklists are opposite to search in a sense. Naive search is an easy target for those who try to game its results in an endless arms war. Ads and annoyance listings are not, because those who want to game it would a) delete the specific rules and get catched by feedback, b) add rules to downplay the opponents and also get reported. In a search, there is hard to say who played low, because everyone will do that.
I think “we” should resurrect directories instead of a search, which already presented itself as nonsense in a long run for too many times.
A directory is a categorized collection of links with a meaningful description (opposed to in-site bs marketing claims which these sites have to do no matter what) and few curated comments. E.g. awesome lists out there:
https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python
https://github.com/quozd/awesome-dotnet
https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
… think awesome cars, awesome appliances, awesome socks, awesome instruments, awesome food etc. Every area has some interned knowledge which waits for a platform to post it on. There will be ads push force just like with search, but at least it would be controlled by community, not by faceless moremoney entity. The difference with search is that search is automated and thus is much more vulnerable to ranking tricks. You can then run very naive search over this curated data and get good results.
Also it would shift trust from sites (which you want to find out to trust or not in the first place) to people who pull-request links into a directory. You never know which of SERP results made by whom. In a directory, you can see who posted what and what their rating or age of participation is. This is inevitable because in a modern world trust can only be built with time to a person, and there is no good will except of someone real who got tired of the shit so much that they are ready to go to lengths to explain/advise/help others and get it back eventually (that’s the core of the foss idea). No corp can align with what we want anymore, because their competition is always better at money, and at SERP. There is simply no other way, in my view.