My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search terms (that mind you are so freaking obscure) all go to this same site. It's driving her nuts.
At this point SEO has been totally gamed and search is totally useless now. We NEED an alternative.
I've had a few experiences recently where I was searching for a webpage that I knew existed (because I'd been to it previously), but that was fairly niche and couldn't find it through Google even after trying several different sets of search terms and even fragments of text I remembered from the site.
It needs some user-experience upgrades - currently its default is to not omit anything, should be a default in settings. It is also trying to re-write my search as I type and often causing spelling errors. But yes I agree this is what I am looking for.
Not sure if I am misunderstanding the problem, but are you aware you can exclude terms from the search results? For example with google "baseball cards -ebay" will omit pages where ebay is mentioned.
I have a similar problem with SEO for recipes. There are tons of recipes SEO'd to a certain site that has a registration/paywall that frequently appear at the top of search results. Luckily they are relatively easy to avoid in the search results.
We have installed a few blockers in chrome to help with the mess, but no luck for my phone's browser which she uses quite a bit too.
It's just sad that all content for a given domain of interest is quickly aggregating on just a few domain names.
Also as a non-facebook user I am so saddened by the user experience facebook gives to people that are trying to look at a Restaurant menu where the idiotic restaurant decided to put their site up on Facebook. No employee of facebook or 66% of the users are going to complain about entering a Facebook CAPTCHA every damn-f-ing time because they are all logged in already.
At this point SEO has been totally gamed and search is totally useless now. We NEED an alternative.