As I understand it, you'd want to continue to search the whole "unbiased" web, then apply different filters / weights on every search. I really do like the idea, but I imagine we'd be talking about an increase in compute requirements of several orders of magnitude for each search as a result.

Maybe something like this could be made a paid feature, with a certain set of reasonable filters / weights made the default.

Maybe this would require too much data to be sent to the client, compared to the usual case where it only needs a page of results at a time. If so, would a compromise be viable, whereby the client receives the top X results and filters those?

The problem is that we have no say in ranking and filtering. I think it should be customisable both on a personal and community level. We need a way to filter out the crap and surface the good parts on all these sites. I am sure Google wouldn't like to lose control of ranking and filtering, but we can't trust a single company with such an essential function of our society, and we can't force a single editorial view on everyone.

As we have many newspapers, each with its own editorial views, we need multiple search engine curators as well.

I'd also love to be able to specify I want results from the last year without having to set it everytime.

I got signed up for goodreads (book review site), and I get tons of spam. It's not quite the same as your idea, but it is a currated list. I don't know how you stop spammers from adding bogus links in the python interest list (to use an example).

This is a hard problem..

EDIT: Clarified goodreads reference!

pro-privacy does not sit well with terms such as search history and user profile

But a system such as I'm describing is probably the only one that can be entirely consistent with the two disparate requirements of fully anonymizing users, and being useful to both programmers and ophiologists studying different things called "python".

It would basically be like sending a search query in this form:

"Python importerror help --prefs={mit_cs_club, studioghiblifans_new, britains_best_baking_prefs, AlpineMountaineersIntl}"

If you like baking, anime, and mountaineering, it's probably convenient to leave all those active for your searches, even your purely programming-focused searches. But you could toggle some of them off if articles about "helping to protect imported mountain pythons" are interfering with your search results, or if you want to be more anonymous. If you're especially paranoid you could even throw in a bunch of random preferences that don't affect your query but do throw off attempts to profile you. You could pretty easily write a script that salts every search with a few extra random preference lists, for privacy or just for fun, and make that an additional feature. The tool doesn't need to maintain any history of your past activity to cater to your search, so I think it would be a good thing for privacy overall.

the more anonymous among us tend to opt for common IP addresses and common user agents to become the tree among the forest. adding a profile to that would, well, only add to a digital fingerprinting profile

> those preferences don't need to be attached to you, just your query

that's not how it works. preferences are by their nature personal. every transaction would have your interests and hobbies embedded, on top of metadata

> mit_cs_club, studioghiblifans_new, britains_best_baking_prefs, AlpineMountaineersIntl

you have voluntarily made yourself the birch among the ebony

> If you're especially paranoid you could even throw in a bunch of random preferences that don't affect your query but do throw off attempts to profile you

how would they not affect the query? they complement the query. or rather, unnecessarily accompany the query. your results depend on your input. it doesn't matter what colour glove you wear to pull the trigger if you bury the gun with the body

> write a script that salts every search with a few extra random preference lists, for privacy or just for fun

just the latter. fuzzing would be pointless since the engine will have already identified you by now

it sounds like an annoying browser extension at best. to label it a pro-privacy tool would be ludicrous