Sadly it seems pretty clear that AI, algorithms, or just any custom content systems ... will be directed AT us now, not FOR us.

Google used to let you ban certain sites from your results, and stopped doing that. I'm using this one and it's quite nice for DDG:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-hide-unwa...

Just add "site:-domain.com" to any given search query.

Yeah, but that approach is annoying and pointless. Typing that is no faster than scrolling past the w3schools results when they appear, so why would I do it?

I Google loads of stuff each day. I want to drop w3schools from all my results, automatically.

Then make the default search on your startpage add that to queries automatically.

p.s. I mostly learnt how to do that on w3schools. :-)

You can easily do that.

If you wanted to exclude example.com just add

    -example.com

to your search query.