Comment by the_snooze
Comment by the_snooze 4 days ago
This is one of those features a proper search engine (i.e., not a thinly-veiled advertising network) should have. If users can customize their search results and share their sorting/filtering methods, then that presents a large number of constantly-moving targets that greatly drives up the cost of SEO. There's no "making the Google algorithm happy." Instead, it becomes more "making the users happy."
Google used to do this years ago but clawed it back around the time they started removing _all_ customizations under the premise of, "we know how to customize your results better than you do."
DuckDuckGo has site blocking. The problem is that there are so many SEO-optimized blogspam, referral link, and other "garbage" sites that you could spend a lifetime blocking each one individually before you get any actual work done. And it's only getting worse now that LLMs can generate a whole web site for you in a matter of minutes. I imagine a dedicated individual could provision several thousand websites/blogs per day, just chock full of ads and referral links.