>> How many times in your life have you thought “damn I know what I want to buy, I just don’t know from which site to buy it”?

I find I do it quite a lot. When I was researching solar. When I needed some actuators recently. Now I'm looking for a trailer. And so on.

Obviously not groceries, but whenever um investigating something new I find commercial sites to be very helpful.

I don't want to argue for ads, but, as someone trying to cut out Amazon from my life, it genuinely is hard to figure out where else to buy stuff these days. Slightly less common things that nonetheless used to be stocked in any halfway decent electronics store just aren't any more.

Would you mind giving more details about your use case? I'm curious.

I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?

> Would you mind giving more details about your use case? I'm curious.

That would definitely have enriched my comment, but, unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything in particular in the moment, and can't now. seb1204 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43564922) mentions one common kind of use case for me: I want to buy some small utility item that I'm used to finding in the hardware store, but it's sufficiently specialty that it's not worth it for the hardware store to carry it, and it's sufficiently small that its price would triple or quadruple if I paid the manufacturer's shipping costs.

> I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?

As I say, I'm stuck in the situation of being vague because I can't think of the last specific time this affected me, but I have definitely dealt with relatively small sellers where the purchase option on their webaite is "here's a link to buy from our Amazon store."

A packet of rubber feet that go underneath the cast iron part on my gas stove. Add stove brand name if needed.

I’m surprised most manufactures even offer individual sales!

If you're referring to sponsored content, then you can actually use MatterRank to configure an engine to devalue content that's trying to sell you something or is sponsored.

If you mean pop-ups, MatterRank can't handle that at the moment because it evaluates markdown content, but it's something we're looking at adding. In the meantime, I'd recommend a good ad-blocker.

Kagi lets you sort by ad/tracker count. You can also downrank or block results from sites you know to be particularly bad with ads, but good at SEO.

Conversely, let me only see sites where I can buy something. Too much of my life is consumed by trying to see if something can be bought and if so how much it costs.

> Give me a way to filter out results with ads on them please.

Use Brave Search with Goggles (https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover). It's great.