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Comment by spurgu | Hacker News Reader

Hey, it just hit me: Is there a search engine (meta or otherwise out there) where I can up/downvote sites (or otherwise customize the rankings)?

Let's say I search for something HTML/JS/CSS related, I would generally want to prioritize MDN over W3Schools, but now I'm at the mercy of whatever the search engine decides is higher relevancy.

I realize dynamic search results could be quite heavy, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be...

Or if I'm just tired of CNN results when searching for news topics I could just downvote them and get other news sites prioritized.

I don't want a search engine to choose these preferences/filters for me, and I don't want "unfiltered" stuff like conspiracy theories in my top hits either just because they're popular.

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Unfortunately any such scheme nowadays would be a lucrative target (to say the least) for bots and mechanical Turks. It would basically just become another SEO metric.

Instead you can exclude a specific site using "-site:example.com". This works on at least DDG and Google. Now, if only search engines would let me save those exclusions as preferences (even in a cookie, in case of privacy-focused search engines like DDG) I could blacklist a whole bunch of high-SEO crap sites. That would be a game changer: one black pattern and you're out of my search results.

I might be too sleepy, but I think there was a time where Google supported blacklisting a site on logged in queries?

There was! I found out about the feature about a month before it was removed...

Google search has had a lot of interesting features like the time when it showed tweets directly in the search results.

You can try this plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-hide-unwa...

Thanks! Someone in another thread recommended this userscript, which adds a small "Block" button next to search results in many search engines:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...

Another approach for Firefox (not sure about other browsers):

Right click on the search box on a website and 'Add a keyword for this search', save it then edit the bookmark to end up with something like https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=-site:example.com %s

I assumed GP meant for your own results only, not indeed have to power to influence everyone else's results.

Edit: checked again, indeed that was the idea:

> these preferences/filters for me,

> any such scheme nowadays would be a lucrative target (to say the least) for bots and mechanical Turks

But that's assuming the service would use your upvotes to change results for other users, right? Would there be any harm in limiting this personalization to the user that made it?

Now what I think would be really cool would be the ability to share your “recipes” with others, in a completely transparent way, kinda like uBlock filter lists. Google's custom search is almost that, but still too black-and-white (and, of course, still comes with all the caveats of being Google).

Outright blocking entire sites or terms is too much. I want a search engine where I can calibrate results in a much more granular way. For instance, if I'm searching for something programming-related (which I could explicitly tell the engine vs. letting it infer for me), I'd like it to do things like not ignore special characters, and official reference documentation to appear first, then maybe Stack Overflow, etc. and leave content farms at the bottom, grouped in a compact space (but not necessarily make them disappear as some of them may actually be useful). Stuff like that.

Haven't tried it, but the architecture of Yacy probably allows it: crawlers everywhere have the index data, and you can define the importance of this or that criteria from your own portal

There is. Email me for invite.

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