My hope is for something like YaCy with a web-of-trust overlay. I'd want it to only show results from peers that I trust, and if garbage starts showing up in my search results, I want to know from which peer it came so I can un-trust it.
Which in my mind is somewhat of a middle ground between a search engine and a directory: what I'd want is a whitelist of curated directories that contain domains to be crawled by my search engine.
Ditto. I would like a fuzzy web of trust: I specify connections that I trust explicitly, and it provides results from that network out N steps. Each hop reduces the confidence value.
And yeah, cited sources so I can un-trust sources of junk.
If it's solvable. There are many problems that aren't.
Perhaps the new Google would just be a 1996-era Yahoo! human-curated catalog.