Probably Google would do good to give up total control and obscurity and put people in the driving seat of search customization. Maybe that would even save them from the anti-trust push (one indexing and retrieval back end + multiple ranking, filtering and UI front ends).

But I'm wondering if this would not be better implemented at browser level. Can we have the white/black list run locally in the browser, re-ranking results on web pages and hiding what we don't want to see? Not just on Google, but also on the rest of the web, like ad blocking extensions.