This is exactly it. There's nothing personalised about Google search results. It doesn't show what I want to see, it shows what they want to show me.

I'd like a search engine where I have some input on the ranking of sites shown to me. Some sites are crap and I never want to see them, other sites are ranked low but often have info I'm interested in.

Even just let me vote my search results up or down on relevance. I can vote on everything else, why not this? (Though ideally, I'd love to be able to devise my own algorithm for these things.)

Does DuckDuckGo have this capability? If it doesn't, it should, and that would be awesome.

Filter out: Pinterest, YouTube, WikiHow, and all the other garbage SEO farms.

Duckduckgo doesn't have builtin. It wouldn't be easy without essentially tracking you, which is the opposite of their claims.

However there is a browser extension you can install. It's either endorsed or developed by duckduckgo.

I've found that I can do that in both DuckDuckGo and Google by adding, for instance: -pinterest -ebay -amazon -wikihow to my query.

My theory is that such a feature would take away too much power from Google being able to control the "sorting" of the search results and it would pull away the veil of what they really do (or don't do). I think the bulk of the common search queries and information on the web (that isn't exotic and super-unique) is accumulated at any one point by a handful of websites (think 100-1000-10000?).

It's highly conceivable that one could get a completely novel and diverse web and search experience if we were to exclude those concentrated websites entirely from search results. At that point, google can no longer slide on just showing the top results from a tiny subset of their index, and would be forced to always show results from the entire index. As opposed to now where 99.9% of the time, they mostly show you results from that smaller subset and 0.1% of the time show you the rest (that is of course only if you have a super-specific query or you force them with some of their remaining search modifiers).

You can do this with uBlock Origin filters, e.g.:

  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".geeksforgeeks.org"])
  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".gitmemory.com"])
  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".tutorialspoint.com"])
  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".w3schools.com"])

there used to be a google provided extension to do this, personal blocklist

they stopped providing it for some reason...

I liked it for blocking quora/pintrest/w3schools/...

Still there https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

I just tried it for W3schools and it worked

that's some other random extension with a similar name whereas the original one was by Google themselves

personally I don't want some random third-party having the ability to exfiltrate my google cookie via an auto-updating extension

> personally I don't want some random third-party having the ability to exfiltrate my google cookie via an auto-updating extension

Driven by the same motivation, I've first adapted a userscript [1], but later replaced it with simple uBlock Origin filters:

  google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".w3schools.com"])

[1] https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/master/userscr...

You can do things like "brexit -express" in search or get an extension if you want that in all searches?

Or more specific -site:quora.com