Unfortunately, I think the most reliable way is to go for a paid search engine from a private company like Kagi, which allows you to blacklist sites and prioritizes quality over ad-friendliness.

As soon as a company goes public, they won‘t focus on trying to sell their product to their customers, but to their investors. And investors currently just love AI. So it goes everywhere, no matter if it’s useful or not. Private companies, on the other hand, have to make a product their customers actually want, otherwise their only source of income will dry up pretty quickly.

So, although there are some other band-aid-solutions out there, I think a more reliable way of getting rid of the slop, and also sending a message, is not to use products from slop-loving companies at all, if possible.

I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/month, maybe even less, depending on how much heavy usage your Nextcloud instance requires. And you won‘t have to worry about keeping your hardware and network running, which pretty much always takes up more time than expected.

Some web hosters (I‘ve had very good experiences with Hetzner) charge an hourly rate and allow you to preconfigure VPSes with software like Nextcloud. So unless you have specific needs, you could just spin up an instance, check if it suits your needs and, if not, only pay a few cents.