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I agree those results are not helpful.

The poster did say it was mostly for STEM subjects though...

More importantly though, I think "Best smartphone 2021" is really a search that has been conditioned on the crap google gives back now. At best you might expect to find a "best smartphones" listicle or something.

This is just a whitelisted search, so in my 5 min playing with it, it looks like popular or consumer queries are more likely to just provide reddit or wikipedia links, while more technical searches land on SO or documentation sites.

I think with a little tuning, this approach is great. Given the modern internet and all the crap there is, a manual whitelist of sites that are actually legit is always going to be superior to an algorithmic approach.

I think your site is great, I've thought about something like this before but didn't realize how simply it could be implemented.

Stupid question though: where is the list of whitelisted sites? Is that something you set up separately with google? I scanned though the code and expected to find a list somewhere, but obviously you do it in a different way

Thanks!

Ads are added automatically by Google. The whole thing is little more than a wrapper around the 'Programmable Search Element Control API' which is an HTML element you can just insert into any site, like an iframe. Unfortunately this is the only way to make Programmable Search available at scale as the API is restricted to either 10 sites or 10K queries / day, even when paid!

There is a paid version for the HTML plugin, but that would leak the API key and so it wouldn't work as a business.

There is an option to get a share of the revenue generated by a search engine. Maybe it's time for me to figure out how that works.

I was thinking of making a hosted, ad free, customizable version where people upload their own keys. Not sure if people would like that.

As a side-note, it's super easy to remove ads with 1 line of CSS, but I wasn't sure how Google would feel about that so it's not in the online version. TamperMonkey is an extension that allows people to insert their own CSS on different websites. Hmm.

You can view all offerings in the docs [0].

[0] https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/overview#su...

While I can understand the appeal, restricting your search engine to only ~120 websites out of hundreds of millions (?) is basically giving up on the Web.

(BTW, any good search engines these days that aren't indirectly using Google or Bing ?)

> restricting your search engine to only ~120 websites out of hundreds of millions (?) is basically giving up on the Web.

Sure - the web is now a cesspool optimized for advertising and attention. The traditional search engines made a lot more sense at the dawn of the internet when it was more about discovery. Now, for the most part, it's closer to an information retrieval tool, where a finite list of established sites have the bulk of what one is looking for. It only makes sense to have a tool that lets one navigate the established, legit internet, and not have to deal with all the crap.

That doesn't mean there is no use case for google as it is, but some more focused competition is a no brainer.