It's incredibly frustrating when the front door to the internet doesn't actually do the one thing it's supposed to do.
Even if you gleefully state that the algorithm finds what users most want, Google is a search product not a technology art installation, and what user's engage with is a function of what you show them in the first place. Pinterest should not be 50%+ of the results for any image search. Pinterest is not the greater internet.
Google indexes and provides results for many sites whose content is inaccessible without an account, yet these results take precedent over actual unrestricted content.
Similarly with Google News, why are they showing me headlines of articles I am not able to access?
I think a new search engine would have a very hard time getting through challenges google has already, like link spam, authority domain spam (using medium etc for spammy content), and many many other issues about people manipulating results.
Google is so big—has such a large market share—that they have to operate pseudo-governmentally, by creating and managing neutral rule sets (or at least what appear to be).
It feels to me like there are search opportunities somewhere between Google (the everything engine) and individual site searches (which usually suck). I often get my best results out of Google by using their “site:” operator to target the few sites I know are likely to be useful.
Google needs to show you results in order to be able to show ads as much as possible.
And so they make it difficult to restrict your query even if that's what you want to do.
This also shows that Google filters their results. test -test produces 4,000,000,000. Yet, jim -jim finds 0 results.
0 here
About 4,040,000,000 results (0.57 seconds)
> jim -jim
Your search - jim -jim - did not match any documents.