Search you can rank yourself

Every ask, newest first

Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.

Reader’s note. 2022 cluster around declining Google quality; Kagi now covers much of it.

1. Oct 2024Wants Polis-style community voting on web search results, with trust weighting to downvote garbage. Read it: a comment in “ChatGPT Search”
2. Jul 2024Wants a way to report inaccurate sites so search engines can down-rank them. Read it: a comment in “Apple blog TUAW returns as an AI content farm”
3. Jun 2023Wants a 2000s-style search engine with social downvoting to bury SEO spam blogs. Read it: a comment in “Google no longer automatically indexes websites?”
4. Apr 2022Asks why there is no open-source search engine where users pick the ranking algorithm. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Why isn’t there an open source Google with pick your algorithm?”
5. Apr 2022Wants a whitelist-first search engine, with an option to show all results. Read it: a comment in “Pinry: A Selfhosted Alternative to Pinterest”
6. Jan 2022Wants a hackable search engine where a script can demote sites with ads or on a list. Read it: a comment in “Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories”
7. Jan 2022Asks for a plugin to build a personal search index limited to a whitelist of sites. Read it: a comment in “Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories”
8. Dec 2021Wants a way to permanently exclude chosen sites and keywords from all search results. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?”
9. Dec 2021Wants a community blocklist of copycat code-snippet sites for filtering search results. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?”
10. Jul 2021Would pay for a search engine that never shows results from domains the user selects. Read it: a comment in “USA Today is getting a paywall. Who’s the audience for it?”
11. Jun 2020Would pay about a dollar monthly for lightweight, ad-free search with filters like no JS or forums only. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Product Needed – Willing to Pay”
12. May 2020Wants a search option to exclude ecommerce sites when looking for how-to information. Read it: a comment in “Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments”
13. Mar 2020Wants a browser add-on that auto-filters SEO-heavy sites like Quora and W3Schools from Google results. Read it: a comment in “Stagnation and Scientific Incentives”
14. Jan 2016Would pay for a tool that manages Google results, hiding sites and links already seen across related searches. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: What software would you pay for right now?”