npilk // Customizing web search
Summary: I set up a simple Cloudflare Worker script to automatically redirect my web search queries based on keywords I've chosen, getting me to my destination faster and reducing the need to hunt through search results. If you just want to see the script, you can check it out here. Read on for more on why I did this.
Most of the discussion I've seen about the quality of Google's results is focused on content searches. People cite searches for things like product recommendations (which turn up a lot of ads and content marketing spam) or error messages (which can turn up those weird Stack Overflow clones) as examples of poor outcomes when using Google. In examples like these, the desired page isn't known in advance.
Here's the thing with content searches: result quality is pretty hard to measure. Sure, getting a bunch of spam links is clearly bad. But even if you get results that seem trustworthy, how do you know you've gotten the best answer to your question? Maybe there are other results out there that would have been even better—more authoritative, more comprehensive, easier to understand, etc. You don't know what you don't know. Personally, I'm on the fence about Google's result quality for content searches; while it does seem that Google's results are lower-quality than they used to be, I still find they are typically more relevant for me than other engines' are. (Although Brave seems to get pretty close.)
On the other hand, quite a few of my searches are page searches, especially on mobile. Some examples of the kinds of pages I am searching for: company websites, Wikipedia pages, actors or movies on IMDb, Youtube channels or specific videos, Sports Reference pages for specific players or teams, etc. For a page search, result quality is much more objective. Since I know the exact page I'm looking for, a good search engine would make it really simple for me to find it. It's frustrating when I'm looking for a specific site and have to hunt through a list of ads and irrelevant links to get there.
