Absolutely; native filtering support to exclude the domains of my choosing would be the killer feature for me that would make me switch to basically any search engine. I'll even sign up for an account there, and all the possible privacy/query logging that entails, to maintain the blacklist state. Browser userscript addons are just too clunky, screw up the number of results per page and don't work on image searches.

Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.

Are you looking for https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ ?

> Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. > Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.

> Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.

It'd be a bit ironic if we go back towards curated search engines (i.e. catalogs of the 1990s) due to the algorithms making a mess of it.

There was something magical about diving into a hierarchy of arbitrary classification and finding links to new sites you never knew existed.

Nowadays I never discover new gems on Google. Only Pinterest/Quora/fake-Instagram junk.