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Comment by guntars | Hacker News Reader

What Google needs is to do is start taking explicit user feedback. If I click on something and it's a major waste of time, I want to be able to tell Google to never show me this result or the whole domain. Why can't I do this? They are happy to hoover all of my data in the name of "personalization", but there's zero way I can personalize the results myself without resorting to insecure 3rd party extensions.

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That is the main value proposition for the new search engine https://kagi.com/ Each result has a menu to block or boost the domain, to remove SEO spam, and pin relevant domains (the online documentation for that framework that always ranks below stackoverflow) to the top. So far I am loving it.

Back in the early 2000s there was a browser toolbar from Google that allowed you to do exactly that. Maybe such a tool today would be too easy to abuse?

Indeed, why does Google not use their full stack? Other competitors have the problem that SEO agencies can flood the feedback with manipulated data. However, with Android, Google knows the identity of enough people that they can identify the genuine feedback.

There is already a search engine for feedback: Whaleslide.com [1] seems to let users curate content with collections. However, I haven't seen a link to a collection on their results pages.

[1] https://whaleslide.com/info/collections

*edit:

also: https://ninfex.com

>There is no crawler, our index is built solely by users submitting interesting and useful links. There is no complex search algorithm.

This would be fine on a per user basis, but if your "downvote" informs baseline results, it can also be gamed, with people burying each others' sites by sending malicious negative signals to google about them.

> Why can't I do this?

You can answer this yourself: just think about whether Google is incentivised by the quality of search results, or by something else.

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