I want the small web back. I want more people to produce quality ad-free content for the love of doing so and the desire to make the world a better place. And then I want a classic search engine to find stuff; one that heavily downranks content with ads.

100% agree, but I don't know how to turn back the clock to browsing weird little sites of back text on gray background in NCSA Mosaic.

There is https://marginalia-search.com/