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.
Best Answer
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).