Sometimes, it feels Google is increasingly useless at finding those niche websites because all the noise has time to do search engine """optimization""".

I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... but it should come with pre-compiled lists, like uBlock Origin.

I’m glad I’m not the only one to think that. I wonder what a good way to measure that signal to noise ratio is?

This feels like an application of the 80/20 rule. I might not always find what I need in just that offline index, but the times I do would seriously disrupt google.

Great extension, thanks!

Oh, I wish there were a way to rate the results in a opposite way. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I want even mark some site as 'a hidden gem'. Usually it's something rather niche though, like a bunch of great little articles about anti-aliasing filters design and sampling, full of engineering wisdom from the decades of experience. So I think it would be perfect to have a way to tag it by some topic.

Google is pretty terrible at finding that stuff (as well as DuckDuckGo.) Instead, the first two or three pages of results are the SEO kings, often with identical copy. https://millionshort.com is a search engine that is entirely a reaction to that.

Why not download an index of the 100,000 or 1,000,000 sites which appear most often weighted by position? If they don't reach a certain threshold of quality (maybe the query is too obscure) then resend the query online?

I don't have a CS background so I'm not sure, is this a reasonable solution?

The obscure sites are what make the core of the internet, at least in my circles.

But having a way of making sure that a certain topic or genre of sites is well indexed locally would work. I.e. "my" top 100k. Oh, how awesome would that be.

Google is deciding what is best for you to see.