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> No, I'm pretty sure users want more knobs or at least filter options.

Nah, 90% either don't or wouldn't use them if they were there.

Sure, if you ask people directly if they want more options, they'll say yes, who doesn't want more choices? But that's a different thing from actually using them when they're available. The vast majority of users for a utility service like a search engine just go with the defaults.

I once had users begging me daily to implement 2FA, being so dramatic you'd think it was a principle they'd die for. It became a huge issue in the chat daily. How can we take this site seriously if there's no 2FA? We have no choice but to leave to <competitor> if you don't have 2FA!

Well, a year after we implemented 2FA, I queried the database for users with 2FA enabled, 3 people had it enabled.

Aside, only somewhat related to the previous story, the idea that users want a bunch of knobs and levers is just an example of the HN delusion where HNers regularly think they represent the population, like the person using the Lynx browser.

The person/people on the Linux browser are hilarious. Half the time when someone launches a new site and shows it to hn, they chime in complaining it doesn't work on lynx.

The first few times I saw it, I thought they must have been joking or trolling.

I don't even have time and budget to make my site work well on older versions of IE. It would be insanity to optimize for the 12 people that use lynx.

If your page isn't at least readable in Lynx, then it probably isn't readable by screenreaders or crawlers either. Lynx users aren't expecting pages to be "optimized" for them, but it's not unreasonable to expect text content to be accessible textually. All this whiz-bang JS frippery is shaping up to be Flash wesbites, round two; it was bad then, and it's bad now.

Even Facebook used to work with Elinks (don't know if that's still true).

(1) Is it really that hard to implement 2FA, and (2) Did you just implement the same insecure SMS nonsense that's been getting people's accounts compromised for a while now?, and (3) Did you bother putting anything in your UI saying "Hey! Over here! Look at this new feature!"

Having an advanced set of tools means that anyone can build a simple interface on top of it, providing a subset of features. It's called the facade pattern. It's present in nearly all software systems, in one form or another.

Don't let your supposed experience as a professional techie give you the false impression that you know everything there is to know about tech.

> like the person using the Lynx browser.

First day in my Intro CS class at college, a dude asks about whether the class website supports Lynx.

> domain blacklist feature

I use this Google plugin just for this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

Thanks for the heads up on this. I'll give it a spin.

> even a simple domain blacklist feature would be amazing

    -site:badsite.com

This isn’t blacklisting. A blacklist implies that you only add to it once. Your solution needs to be added on every query.

Does it?

Still possible though: set your browser to use as a search engine Google with those terms already supplied.

> Hell, even a simple domain blacklist feature would be amazing so that I could get the woowoo psuedo science cruft -- which has been SEO'd to the front page -- out of my results

You can put w3schools in /etc/hosts to an IP like 127.0.0.1. You still have to visually parse the search results, but if you accidentally click, you’re not giving a pageview by mistake.