One thing that would help immensely is a programmatic API for search. That way anybody could write a program to contact a REST search server and get back 100 re

One thing that would help immensely is a programmatic API for search. That way anybody could write a program to contact a REST search server and get back 100 results, and then filter out sites that were on one's personal blacklist, and also check the remaining results to see that they did in fact contain the search terms requested. If you try this with Google you'll immediately be captcha'd to hell and back. You can do it with a browser extension (and many of these exist) but you're always at the mercy of the browser maker (often Google itself) who can arbitrarily decide break your extension. Programmatic access to the web was exactly the premise of the so-called "semantic web" from a few years back but it never caught on. We probably need a government-funded search spider and database that is mandated by law to allow REST access and which can never be commercialized. Of course any attempt to build such a thing would be lobbied into the ground by Google, but I can dream.