Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they had it for a few years a decade ago. If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of sear…
I think you miss he point. The usefulness of a per-user block list is not fighting outright spam. The statistical filters, etc, as applied by the search engine, work best here, as you correctly state. The point is to remove certain well-known sites with information about well-known topics, which is unhelpful for the particular user , me. That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly prese…
I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the problem is that there's a basically an infinite supply of them. The boost feature is more interesting in that the curation is at least not a never-ending task. New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often!
It's still not an entirely robust feature since you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites, especially for users with a ton of boosts. But that quality work is much easier to justify when the manual curation is one of your core selling points and used by a large proportion of the customers vs. when it's a feature in a dusty context menu that basically none of the userbase interacts with.
> Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important
I'd be shocked if the number of users for this kind of feature was anywhere near 10% of all search engine users. Something like 0.1% seems much more likely. But again, if those 0.1% really want that feature it's a great fit for a power user search engine.
It still doesn't mean that it's a feature every search engine should obviously have.