Is there a good solution for searching only in specified trusted sites?

I want to setup a search engine that only shows me results from sites I want to see to use occasionally. I found programmablesearchengine.google.com which seemed good, added a bunch of sites (couple of subreddits, blogs of thoughtful people, HN etc.) but I am disappointed with the results.

For one, it doesn't seem to have advanced features like 'search only for results between those dates', for another the results it gives aren't good. E.g. when I google 'favorite sites' it returns 1 result (which is from HN) but when I google 'reddit slatestarcodex favourite sites' (with either normal or the programmable google) it correctly returns a bunch from https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/ even if the 'reddit slatestarcodex' part seems redundant as it's already in my list. This obviously makes it much less useful because I don't get good results unless I specify the site.

Is there a better alternative? Another search engine that offers you to setup larger lists of sites (rather than just doing site:..), something else built on top of Google, crawling the sites myself?