For a longtime, I have been wondering why the browser builders have not started grabbing metadata from users. It seems like a real waste that users can't add value to the internet by leaving data as they browse. For example, how hard would it be to have two ways to move to a new location, browser back happy, and browser back unhappy. By simply replacing a single back arrow on the browser with two, users could vote whether or not to include a site in the query results for a given search string. If enough people return to say a google search result from a given site by hitting return unhappy, then, google could stop including that site in that particular search result. A simple return bar could have multiple return to query back arrows to mark a site as commercial, academic, technological, or personal, etc. Google, yahoo, and other search engines could capture this information and enhance the value of their databases by offering additional query filters like commercial , academic, tech...
Well, this hasn't happened exactly, but, stumbleupon has a browser add-on that does capture user input to rate sites. This allows stumbleupon to know which sites users like best. They can therefore present these sites by category for user random viewing.
So, it doesn't seem like a perfect solution, but it's a start. Maybe someday the browser builders and search engine providers will join together to use the whole hive. In the mean time, we'll have to parse search results on our own, every-time, over and over.
P.S. Maybe next time I'll rant about search engines and their lack of regular expression support:-(
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