Is There a Non-Commercial Search Engine?
Google does not allow websites to pay for higher placement. There are two reasons you could get stores as the first natural results (i.e. not ads) when you’re not looking for them: 1. Some website owners use dishonest techniques to try and trick Google into ranking them higher 2. Google could think that you’re actually looking for a store. To prevent this, you could try tweaking your queries or making sure Search History is turned on. Google’s ranking algorithms are constantly being tweaked and improved to filter out spammy results and provide ones more relevant to what you’re looking for. But, to directly answer your questions (it looks like there are actually two): As far as a non-commercial search site, there’s Wikia Search from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. But, I’m afraid to say there’s no real alternative to Google at this point in time. However, I don’t think Google is as bad as you think. In fact, they’re actually pretty altruistic.
