Unfortunately any such scheme nowadays would be a lucrative target (to say the least) for bots and mechanical Turks. It would basically just become another SEO metric.
Instead you can exclude a specific site using "-site:example.com". This works on at least DDG and Google. Now, if only search engines would let me save those exclusions as preferences (even in a cookie, in case of privacy-focused search engines like DDG) I could blacklist a whole bunch of high-SEO crap sites. That would be a game changer: one black pattern and you're out of my search results.
> any such scheme nowadays would be a lucrative target (to say the least) for bots and mechanical Turks
But that's assuming the service would use your upvotes to change results for other users, right? Would there be any harm in limiting this personalization to the user that made it?
Now what I think would be really cool would be the ability to share your “recipes” with others, in a completely transparent way, kinda like uBlock filter lists. Google's custom search is almost that, but still too black-and-white (and, of course, still comes with all the caveats of being Google).
Outright blocking entire sites or terms is too much. I want a search engine where I can calibrate results in a much more granular way. For instance, if I'm searching for something programming-related (which I could explicitly tell the engine vs. letting it infer for me), I'd like it to do things like not ignore special characters, and official reference documentation to appear first, then maybe Stack Overflow, etc. and leave content farms at the bottom, grouped in a compact space (but not necessarily make them disappear as some of them may actually be useful). Stuff like that.
Another approach for Firefox (not sure about other browsers):
Right click on the search box on a website and 'Add a keyword for this search', save it then edit the bookmark to end up with something like https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=-site:example.com %s
Instead you can exclude a specific site using "-site:example.com". This works on at least DDG and Google. Now, if only search engines would let me save those exclusions as preferences (even in a cookie, in case of privacy-focused search engines like DDG) I could blacklist a whole bunch of high-SEO crap sites. That would be a game changer: one black pattern and you're out of my search results.