Just this morning I was thinking of making a search engine that only looks among personal blogs plus a whitelist of sites like stackoverflow and Wikipedia. Or something like the old web in general. Or it has to be non profit (no ads, no subscription options, no paid content, only donation/flattr if anything). I haven't decided on a good rule yet, it's quite tricky.

At any rate, the idea is to somehow filter out all the garbage when I just want to know how to do something. Too often I have to find personal blog links on stackoverflow ("PS. I wrote more about it here") as opposed to that helpful article simply showing up in the search results by itself.

You'll probably like Million Short (https://millionshort.com/) then, a search engine that can filter out the most popular websites.

This is pretty nice. It's effectively working as a blocklist from top domains.

It would be interesting to see a curated version with an allowlist of domains as well, like how Angelfire and friends in the 90s used to be with a "web ring" of peer websites.

Yep. The genuinely useful stuff is never coming from Medium/Twitter personalities. Instead I often find it on obscure Blogspot sites with a few posts per year, with archives going back to 2006 or so. That's where you find content from actual good engineers. Leave the Twitter e-celeb drama to the plebs, and Medium to the CV-filler fluff.

Because people see writing a blog or guest articles as a sign of possible expertise, but are generally too time crunches to check for themselves.