Since a couple years ago I think I've been increasingly becoming dissatisfied with the quality of google search results.
For technical (at the level where the hoi polloi don't search for these things) topics I think the results tend to be fine because the only sources discussing the topics are already highly technical.
However, for mundane topics like diet, health, exercise, air quality, studying methods, and so forth (which still interest me, even though the HP are also interested in these things), the results dominating the search result pages tend to be dumb SEO-optimizing sites that are light on content and have annoying site designs. I think that given expertise in a topic, it's pretty easy to find the good sites and whitelist these. Unfortunately, I don't have this sort of expertise in too many topics, so I can't just go ahead and say "here are the good sites if you want to read about topic X", and even if I could, that's still not as good as having a search engine.
In addition, I sometimes want to restrict my search to some intelligent subset of the web, e.g. I want to search within the "rationalist blogosphere" or within the "econ blogosphere" or something like that. I already have a google custom search engine for this but the last time I checked, google CSE couldn't search within reddit for some reason. (Also it can't search within Facebook, etc.)
I wish there was some sort of whitelist-based search engine that automatically excluded the dumb SEO-optimizing sites (and other low-quality sites).
Since a couple years ago I think I've been increasingly becoming dissatisfied with the quality of google search results.
For technical (at the level where the hoi polloi don't search for these things) topics I think the results tend to be fine because the only sources discussing the topics are already highly technical.
However, for mundane topics like diet, health, exercise, air quality, studying methods, and so forth (which still interest me, even though the HP are also interested in these things), the results dominating the search result pages tend to be dumb SEO-optimizing sites that are light on content and have annoying site designs. I think that given expertise in a topic, it's pretty easy to find the good sites and whitelist these. Unfortunately, I don't have this sort of expertise in too many topics, so I can't just go ahead and say "here are the good sites if you want to read about topic X", and even if I could, that's still not as good as having a search engine.
In addition, I sometimes want to restrict my search to some intelligent subset of the web, e.g. I want to search within the "rationalist blogosphere" or within the "econ blogosphere" or something like that. I already have a google custom search engine for this but the last time I checked, google CSE couldn't search within reddit for some reason. (Also it can't search within Facebook, etc.)
I wish there was some sort of whitelist-based search engine that automatically excluded the dumb SEO-optimizing sites (and other low-quality sites).