Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification

We now need two things. First, an antitrust breakup of Google, separating search and ads. Second, a tax on ads.

It must be made against the economic interests of search engines to show too many ads.

While I believe that the idea of splitting Search and Ads could be a game changer, how would Search become profitable without Ads, and without compromising the rank algorithm?

Search placement ads stay with search. Ads people can put on their own page go with the new company that is broken off.

freemium? See e.g. Kagi

I agree with the first. The second I think is missing the target. This really doesn't have anything to do with search. Instead this is Google (The largest ad seller) using it's market position (as the maker of Chrome/Chromium, the most popular browser) to prevent users from not seeing its ads on any website where they're displayed.

It's never going to be against the economic interest of search engines to show ads, they can sell spots on their front page which are always going to be valuable.

This should be against their tactical interests, because it hurts their accuracy driving away users, but absent a significantly more accurate competitor they'll get away with it for a long time.

Regarding Google search there are some hopeful signs. For one some people report Google's accuracy dropping, and Google keeps switching up its idiosyncrasies to avoid spam but in doing so they devalue the effort people put into SEO and into refining their Google-fu. These might be the same thing however.

Kinda hard to make a competitor if you can't scrape the web because curl hasn't been blessed

Google Search could still show ads, but they'd need to evaluate which ad exchange to use, of which Google Ads would only be one option.