Google searches with permanent filters

Question

I'm wondering if there's a way to make google searches where you can set filters you want to be in effect permanently - like a filter profile. So, for instance, every time you would do a search, you could get results that didn't include say, Yahoo Answers, without having to type in -yahoo -answers.

A feature like this would be invaluable because it's very common to perform a search and want to filter out a lot of popular sites that would normally top the rankings. For example, suppose you're searching for a news topic and don't want to read mainstream media articles. You could add the words reuters, cnn, huffington post, daily mail, and so on to your filter profile and never see those sites turn up in any of your searches ever again.

I'm asking because I'm interesting in making an extension that would do precisely this, but there's no point if such a feature already exists.

Answer 1

You can create a Custom Search in minutes. It's called Google CSE (Custom Search Engine)

This is a sample public link that I've created based on your example above: https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=006201654654568968489:1kv4asuwfvs

In the settings:

I can choose to exclude by url, url pattern, or even urls within my search results

If you need more ways, here's a good and relevant link.

Answer 2

Search filters can be specified as part of the URL (e.g. append site:example.com/section1 to a Google query to only yield results whose locations start with that prefix). So you can make a search plugin that substitutes your query into such a template and install it into your browser.

Search plugins are generally XML files with a standardized schema. OpenSearch is one such standard supported by Chrome.

There are sites that host collections of user-submitted plugins as well as tools to generate your own. An example that I use is the Mycroft project (originally created for Apple Sherlock software that pioneered the concept and later accepted into the Mozilla project when Firefox took on the feature).