By the way, why can't I still tell Google to ignore e.g. pinterest or w3schools?
Google wants to know everything about me so they can serve me better (they claim), but a simple preference to exclude a website from my search results is not possible?
>By the way, why can't I still tell Google to ignore e.g. pinterest or w3schools?
You can. Use "-site:pinterest.com -site:w3schools.com". To facilitate using it in every search, setup a keyword search so you can type "gsearch blah" and have the querystring automatically add those two filters. I agree there should be a way to add sites to a global blacklist in your user settings if you have a Google account. I'm sure Google has monetary reasons for not doing so though.
Neat, but this isn't a complete solution as I, and many others, use Firefox. I can't see a good reason this needs to be an addon instead of a user setting, other than to only allow only Chrome users to use the "official" add-on. There is a Firefox version that, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, is called "Personal Blocklist (not by Google)". I keep the number of addons I install to a minimum so will be sticking with my keyword searches (I actually filter Pinterest from my searches).
It works in any modern browser that I'm aware of - it allows you to use the Address Bar/Omnibar to conduct a search by typing a keyword. For example, I can search Youtube by typing "y Daoko Fog" and it will search Youtube for "Daoko Fog" because the letter "y" is my keyboard for Youtube. You also don't need to use it just for searching - you can use it for quicker navigation since ultimately it is just swapping your text in for the spot in the keyword, you can have it set up like "news.ycombinator.com/%s" and type in "hn newest" or "hn show" or "hn news" to be taken to the respective pages.
In Firefox you can right click most any search bar and "Add a Keyword for this Search".
It used to be that in Chrome it was that easy as well, but now you need to edit a bookmark and it's a bit more involved OR you can add a "Search Engine" and customize the keywords in about:preferences#search
In mainstream browsers at least, I believe it is implemented as an additional field to any bookmark. You change the URL to have "%s" where the search term should go in the URL and then you update the Keyword field of the bookmark.
Then when you type the keyword and search, the %s gets replaced with your search phrase. You would need to hardcode the -site: bits to have it always added to your search. You can even create multiple bookmarks that filter out different sites if you want.
Google wants to know everything about me so they can serve me better (they claim), but a simple preference to exclude a website from my search results is not possible?