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a_mariachi_band
Copper Contributor
Jan 01, 2026

FEATURE REQUEST: User-settable Favored AND Unfavored sources for search results

Google recently introduced https://blog.google/products/search/preferred-sources/ which allows people to see news results from sources they prefer more frequently.

I think this is a great idea, and it would be even better if users could specify preferred and un-preferred sources for all search results in general, not just news results. For example, when I search for "nodejs logging," almost the entire first page of results is from company blogs or tutorial websites whose perspective I don't really care about:

These sites are EVERYWHERE and I frequently find myself digging through many search results to find sources that I actually do want to hear from. There is no need for me to see five different company blog posts that look like paraphrasings of each other summarizing the "best practices for logging in nodejs" or similar. Maybe showing one of these posts from a source that I trust is appropriate, but after that, I'm interested in authentic community discussions (e.g., StackExchange, Reddit), RFC-type websites (not sure if these exist for Node.js, but things like Python's PEPs or Rust's RFCs, so very official, community-driven discussions), official documentation from the logging libraries themselves, and personal blog posts that go more in-depth into a real person's opinions about and experiences with logging. One way I could signal to Bing that this is what I want, is to set websites like StackExchange, Reddit, official documentation pages, personal blogs I like, etc. as "favored" sources, and set what I consider to be "slop" websites, like LogRocket, as "unfavored" sources.

Another example of the above, which I want to emphasize because it frequently comes up for me, is looking up references for functions in the Python standard library, for example, "python open()". The first page of results in this case come from realpython.com, w3schools.com, geeksforgeeks.org, programiz.com, and a bunch of videos for the remainder of the page. In my opinion, it is insane that we get every website except the official Python.org documentation for open(), which is actually what I'm looking for. I could rectify this by adding python.org as a preferred source.

A final example that frequently pops up for me is cooking. I often search questions like "how many cups are in a pound of sliced carrots," and invariably, I get search results from websites like these:

I can't prove it, but these websites look like they are LLM-generated to me. At any rate, I much prefer to hear it from a source like this, which looks more like an actual publication with an editorial team and humans vetting the information:

Since chefsresource.com comes up so frequently in my search results, and I always avoid looking at it, it would make sense for me to "blacklist" it by adding it as an unfavored source, so that almanac.com result is more likely to come up as a relevant result to me.

Google search seems to avoid all of these problems by default, and it behaves more the way I want for a search engine. Still, I think allowing users to tailor their own search results by specifying "favored" and "unfavored" sources would be a great differentiating feature for Bing search.

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