Improve Google

In response to a post by Matt Cutts:

Is there a new product or feature that you wish Google offered? Is there anything on the web that annoys you because there’s not a useful product that does exactly what you need? Is there an extra feature of Gmail, AdWords, Google Maps, AdSense, Google News, or another product that you wish we offered?

I can think of a lot of new features or products that I’d like to have, but I don’t want to skew the opinions. This thread is completely open-ended: I’m looking for any feature or product that a regular user might want.

I have suggested all of these for years and I still want them:

1) Let me chose the type of files searched (exclude pdfs, word, power point..). Then if I can’t find what I want I can expand to include them. At the very least give me some way of making the type much more visible (I realize it is there now but I often click before my mind notices…).

2) Let me remove web sites from my default searches. I would imagine this could even be used to help Google’s normal search results by getting a sense of sites huge numbers of people “block” The same spam sites show up for searches and I would rather block them if Google can’t figure out how to do so.

3) Let me create site search lists, where I create lists of sties I want searched – then I can target my searches how I want. Actually now that Rollyo does this [the broken link was removed] I don’t care that much but since they use Yahoo to do so, I would figure maybe Google will finally make this available. It would be nice if you suggested sites others with similar site lists included.

New requests:

1) It would be cool if I could rate sites and that was factored into my returned results. This could obviously use the Google toolbar for user input pretty effectively, I imagine. A simple 1-5 or 1-10 scale. It would probably be a good idea to let users have some simple way of say having all their bookmarked files automatically give the web site the highest rating so they don’t have to manually enter every one. Then they could edit the results. Same with the search lists in item 3 above. It should also be setup so I can accept other users settings. So if I trust John Battelle or Sean Stickle I can have their ratings (obviously only for ratings people make “public”) reflected in my results. That would involve complications when one person I chose to include says a site is a 1 and another says a site is a 5 but I figure Google is very capable of figuring out a good way to make that work.

2) I don’t have too much trouble with this on Google search results now (but Google News does), let me block non-available content (behind paid or unpaid walls) in the default search (then let me “whitelist” certain sites so they show up – for sites I either just want to see anyway of sites I have registered for…).

I still think Google is excellent but honestly the value of Google’s results compared to Yahoo and MSN is much less than it was 2 years ago, in my opinion as a search engine user. To me the others are closing the gap with Google and Google needs to make some improvements more than ever before (assuming Google wants to stay ahead of the others which I think is a fair assumption). It isn’t a feature but improving the results is also important – too many spam sites are returned now.