You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance.

If the search engine orders by relevance, than I can make the decision for myself of where to trade-off with paywalls.

I don’t want a search engine to make the decision for me because it cannot: what if the only answer to my question is behind a paywall?

“ You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance.”

I didn’t make that claim, i am contesting the claim “Only relevance should decide ranking”. I am arguing ease of accessibility should be a factor.

	▲	hombre_fatal a day ago \| parent [-]
		Unless you mean as a tie-breaker in the niche case of equally-relevant results, then you're making the claim that it's better to see less relevant (or nonrelevant) results just because they have some other quality beyond relevance.