99%+ of people in the medical industry did not sanitize hands or equipment 100 years ago.

99%+ of people in the tech industry currently do not care to do the extra steps required for data neutrality, and privacy.

99%+ of people are lazy to the point of harming themselves and others.

1%- of people examine how the 99%+ do things and pioneer harm reduction tactics in spite of everyone constantly reminding them that no one wants their help.

>99%+ of people in the medical industry did not sanitize hands or equipment 100 years ago.

this isn't true. 170 years ago, maybe. handwashing became a thing in the late 1800s after Semmelweiss and Pasteur

I will adjust this analogy by 70 years in the future, just for you.

99% of analogies are correct

Why should we care about 99% of people? They are people who upload all their personal data to social networks agreeing to "we can do whatever we want" terms, they pay with a card, use Apple's and Microsoft's spyware (which marketing people call "telemetry") ridden operating systems, and install Chrome that sends a signal to Google every time they open a new tab and sends data about every form on every website they visit (which Google developers call "crowdsourcing" in the code [1]).

Make a customizable and privacy-respecting search for us, power users.

Also, I have noticed that Firefox internal search works good for sites you had visited. So when I want to visit a page I have seen earlier, I can go straight to it skipping Google.

Also, you can click on any search box and add it with a prefix, so that you can search MDN or Wikipedia directly, again, without informing Google.

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...

20% to 40% of internet users use an adblocker depending on whose statistics you use.[1][2][3]

SEO is basically another form of advertising, so evidence suggests to me that people would use something like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#:~:text=users

[2] https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-ad-blockers/

[3] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking

A quick, entirely unrepresentative look at the user count for uBlock Origin and uBlacklist in Firefox make me somewhat less optimistic than you are. Or is there a more popular way of blocking sites from search results than uBlacklist out there, which I simply don't know about?

uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus are the most popular extensions on Firefox, with each around 5 to 5.5 million average daily users over a whole year[1].

I believe the addon page is average daily users over a week or 6 days?[2]

Firefox monthly active users (unique over 28 days) is around 200 to 210 million worldwide (26 to 22 million in the USA)[3].

It's probably wrong to compare those numbers but a very naive 200 / 28 = 7.41 million average unique users per day. 5 / 7.41 = 67% (probably wrong)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1168642

[3] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Add a thumbs up / down icon, and your average Facebook user would likely use it without knowing what it was.

More and more search engines are now giving you the option to customize search results. Brave has Goggles, You.com has thumbs up / down icon and other alternative search engines have similiar capabilites too. I have been really enjoying the ability to tailor my search to how I like it and e.g. rank reddit (although it seems like it is not liked by some folks here) higher.

why would a search engine use this for a different purpose than FB does?

It could work like spam filtering. Once a certain number of users have marked a site as spammy (or put it on their blacklist), it gets downranked for everyone. But jstummbillig is right. It could easily get gamed.