While you may be able to open up some switches, I don't think you can build a reasonable user experience on something like that, since anything that allows you

While you may be able to open up some switches, I don't think you can build a reasonable user experience on something like that, since anything that allows you significant control over how the results are chosen (beyond the simple control you've mentioned, like prefer certain types of results) will be both too complex for anything other than like distributed common sets of options (like a plugin that comes with presets) and/or have so many knobs as to make tuning for good results infeasible. I would argue Google already supports some of what you want, like allowing you to search just for news, although additional filters based on something like the niche you're looking for or the type of content don't hurt.