I use Tampermonkey[1] with the "Google Hit Hider by Domain"[2] plugin to de-crapify my search results.
In spite of the name, it works on all search engine sites I've tried it on; Google, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Qwant. It adds a "Block" button beside each search result which allows you to block sites from appearing in that particular search result. Or to 'perma-ban' them from ever showing in future search results.
[Insert sound of computer being thrown across room]
And, while I'm on the subject, my tuppence worth for the list. Fucking You-fucking-Tube being returned as the first dozen search results for some crappy one liner which you've forgotten and need to look up quickly...
SEARCH: "cheatsheet keyboard shortcut for function Z in app Y"
WHAT I WANT THE SEARCH TO RETURN: "App Y Keyboard shortcut cheatsheet"
WHAT THE SEARCH ACTUALLY RETURNS: [almost an entire page of] "Take zen ninja mastery of Application Y in minutes by learning this arse-sum keyboard shortcut!" --a 45 minute unedited epic, filmed by a monosyllabic arsehole on a shaking, continually auto-focussing phone camera, orientated vertically. Featuring 20 minutes of "er... um... well..." mumbling at the beginning, telling the viewer how "arse-sum" this keyboard shortcut is going to be --if the fucker ever gets around to actually showing you it!
Followed by the actual clicking of the shortcut which the narrator manages to do while the camera is pointed at the wrong part of the screen and out of focus.
Under the box on the righthand side there's a link with the text "See more on Stock Overflow"
Obviously a just small typo but I suppose I'm surprised this text was typed by a human in the first place. FWIW it's spelled correctly just above.
Good eye, thank you. It is fixed.
Every "Deep Search" is manually tuned and added as a search within the search, and each one is slightly different depending on the type of information that data source returns.
I use Yandex Browser [Chromium-based] so, unfortunately, FireMonkey isn't an option.
The article you linked to is quite vague as to what the security implications might be. It says that FireMonkey extensions run in a sandbox. But you're still being asked the usual "This extension wants to see and modify your data on all websites.." [or whatever the exact wording is]. So, you're still letting the installed scripts have access to your browsing.
One good thing about <whatever>Monkey and userscripts is that they make it trivially easy to inspect the scripts and see what exactly is being done. Whereas a browser extension is more of a 'black box'. So, there is more potential to spot potentially nefarious code in a userscript.js.
For some reason the usescript script only works with Violentmonkey but not FireMonkey for me. (FF 76.0.1)
Tampermonkey is the one that has privacy issues but what's the problem with Violentmonkey?
Well that does sound like a typical query I would not use Google for.
Generally Google gets the questions where I feel like I'm an idiot for asking, or when I feel like the question is best answered as if one were an idiot. Don't worry about spelling or formulation. Google gets to flex its AI "I know what you want" muscles, and you get an answer without having to think about the question very much.
I don't get any videos: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cheat%20sheet%20functi...
>You-f*ing-Tube being returned as the first dozen search results for some crappy one liner which you've forgotten and need to look up quickly
Since Google can monetize YouTube results, I'm afraid this is only going to get worse.
> SEARCH: "cheatsheet keyboard shortcut for function Z in app Y"
Maybe worthwhile to document these on a GH markdown file or contribute cheat sheets to DuckDuckGo.
It is probably just me, but I have noticed a marked drop in rank for Stack Overflow links in search results, even on programming-type questions.
If in fact this is more of a general trend and not my little bubble, then I wonder if this is caused by Stack Overflow mods closing any question that may have an opinion in the answer and since these answers have not shown activity for years, perhaps other links and sites are slowly starting to eat SO's lunch.
Pure speculation on my side.
I would take a wild guess that it's less of Stack Overflow's actions and more that Stack Overflow's shitacular competition takes the highest ranked questions and SEOs the shit out of them to point to less useful more-malvertised sites
I'm no expert, but I can imagine that for sites like Google, Twitter, etc, having a blocklist adds a little complexity, but at their scale, a lot of CPU cycles in overhead. I'm pretty simple in my thought processes though, I'm just thinking that they'd need a unique query for every user, assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user?
> assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user?
Google search doesn't work like this anymore. Search results for everyone are custom based on what they know about your. For example check out filter bubbles[1]. A blacklist would probably help their models. As for why it got removed we can only guess. I'm guessing it has to do with either bad UX (if you forgot you added domains they will never show up) or them wanting to be in full control of your search experience.
The SEO community tried to game the shit out of the blacklist feature.
People with 1000 fake accounts were charging to blacklist a specific domain. Because so few actual search users made use of the feature, it didn't take many accounts to impact search rank. So that feature had a short lifespan.
I don't understand what you mean. The blacklist feature was for an individual to avoid sites they didn't want to see. It wouldn't affect page rank, so what would be the advantage of paying someone to blacklist it in their own settings?
But you can still do it with search operators? It's just more inconvenient but the feature is still there. Doubt that was why
Besides that, they can just stop using the blacklist as a signal for their results, but keep the feature.
> Anybody else here remembers times when Google search supported blocking domains in personal setting?
from memory, the period when this feature actually worked, wasn't very long?
but I agree about the advanced search operators, and just generally paying better attention to my keywords.
Out of curiosity, what do you prefer over StackOverflow? Official documentation, blogs...?
That was just an example based on some comment around here -- quite surprising for me. Personally I even mostly prefer SO for majority of "quick/shallow/how-do-I" technical questions and I think my google persona is well attuned for this. Back in times I've been blocking w3schools.com (very rarely seen in my SERPs nowadays, and seems they somewhat improved over time) and expertsexchange.com (:shivers:). For web platform docs I primarily use `%s site:developer.mozilla.org` in Google and devdocs.io for the rest.
I wrote this because I was so annoyed by irrelevant low-quality search results for my queries on Google. For instance if I'm looking up for Python xyz topic, 99% of the times I am not interested in some 'low-quality' content (based on my personal preferences) from website example.com.
The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
When you search for a file extension, almost always those useless sites pop up that are just advertisements for a ``driver manager" or ``registry cleaner". The justsolve wiki[1] is a pretty good resource for file extensions, but it's not popular enough yet to rank high in search results.
[1]: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/
After looking into it a bit it seems like a good resource, but a few tweaks would be handy:
- TLS would improve the site ranking and make it look much more serious. These days plain HTTP is just a red flag.
- "This Site's URL is permanently http://fileformats.archiveteam.org!" is the first thing I see. That's just weird. Who actually cares? And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user? This is just confusing and makes the site look like it hasn't changed since the 90s.
- "First Time Visiting This Wiki? Please read the Statement of Project to understand why this project exists. Then check out the FAQ for some frequently asked questions about the project and its goals and procedures. Finally, brush up on the guidelines for Editing." Err, no, that's not what any first time user would do, that's what power users might do.
I imagine that right now, it's mostly an internal site for people involved in Archive Team to build out content, and there's an intent to actually publish this as something end users might find useful later.
I'm a first time user and I looked at those pages and found it pretty valuable since the site itself isn't really clear.
I'd expect a site like this to have a big list of extensions on the first page.
> And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user?
In my URL bar right now. It requires a browser that respects one's intelligence.
The justsolve wiki is actually really valuable and good information, but the name always makes me think it's a spam site.
For me it's the stackoverflow and github comment scrapers. They often clutter up my results greatly.
I hate those, but they're so many that you'd need a community maintained list to keep track of them all…
Would there really be enough revenue to warrant doing this, considering 1) scraping and hosting that content requires some effort, 2) the content would (should?) be penalized for plagiarism so they would have very little traffic and 3) developers are probably the worst audience to try and monetize with ads due to the prevalence of ad blockers.
Most people who code are not developers.
Mine and my partners parents learned c (badly) at some point. Nearly everyone on the b2b customer support team at my last job could sling some js. A surprising number of marketers learn to wrangle some carousels/buttons/etc. vba script excel monster stories are prevalent.
These people are great to monetize. They are paid well and doing something they don't understand well.
I see them in search results often enough (sometimes even before the SO post they've scraped) that it seems to be working, and the search engines (both DDG and Google for me) haven't caught on.
> and the search engines haven't caught on.
Sure they have. They just don't care as long as they made their quick buck off of it.
The data is provided as a downloadable dump, so it's really just a basic read only CMS.
Pinterest is somehow getting its tentacles beyond image search now, too. I was recently researching interior paint colours and if I do a search like "interior colours dark walls" (NOT image search) then of the first 10 results there are 3(!!) Pinterest results from three different domains - .com, .co.nz and .co.uk (I'm sure your results will differ based on your region).
It's incredible to me that Google isn't doing SOMETHING to prevent Pinterest from duking their results, and actually seems to be losing ground to Pinterest's SEO dark patterns.
Of the remaining 6 results on that page, 3 of them were low-quality articles with generic language about paint schemes and lots of images, ALL of which had those little Pinterest share badges on them. I don't know it for a fact, but I strongly suspect that these ubiquitous types of websites are either produced in Pinterest's own content mills or are paid for by Pinterest marketing teams.
I really dont get how they've gotten away with it this long. Google killed off eHow relatively quickly after we started doing our shady SEO practices but yet...
I have a feeling it's not SEO, but that Google themselves are favoring more domains over another based on a hidden factor. If you search for recipes you get the same thing, a bunch of results from big media organizations but very few (or none at all) results from smaller forums, self-run sites etc.
If I were to put my cynical tinfoil hat on, I would say Google has optimized a lot of search results to be favored towards sites which heavily advertise/track their users. Google results are no longer "search term" being matched to "content" but there are additional layers which do more magic, like "is this publisher considered favorable or trustworthy to Google" and "will this result generate a positive ROI for Google".
I... did not know this. It's good to know that Google is also responsible for killing the non-corporate web alongside Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps more insidiously.
This is (i think) also happening with youtube. There were a bunch of funny political videos a couple of years ago (eg. "Trump insult compilaton" etc., from different independent individuals), and searching for those terms now just shows videos from CNN, BBC, ABC, CNBC, and other corporate media houses.
That's a very cynical take away from a document saying expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are the most important measures of page quality.
I can see how forums would take a hit because users are anonymous, but personal blogs and niche websites should be rated high. Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines. This would seem to go more so for niche websites as demonstrated expertise should be more apparent.
Note that site reputation was listed as the very least important metric.
I doubt anyone else read all 168 pages, but can you direct me to the page that supports your claim? I didn't find anything that I would qualify as "directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites."
> Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines.
That is pretty exclusive, IMO.
Obviously I haven't read this whole thing during my lunch break but if what you say is true then it explains a lot about why search quality has suffered the last ten years.
Forums, personal blogs and niche websites are often exactly what I want.
Because to optimize the analytics, you optimize the site for analytics and inherently give Google more detailed data. There's no way Google isn't using that data.
The incentives are aligned for Google to do this. I'd like to believe that they don't.
Can you point to anything that might convince skeptical non-Googlers that Google does not do this?
Goddamn Pinterest. No I don't want to sign up for Pinterest just to look at this pic that Google Image Search thinks is available to the general internet!
WTF Google how do you still allow this crap?
I haven't needed that, it just works when I click on the picture then right click on the drill down.
If you right click on the larger image that appears in the dark sidebar popout in Chrome(ium), and select 'View image..' that also works (most of the time).
Problem with that is you'll be downloading the Google cached image, not the source imagine, so the quality is usually worse.
When I worked for google as SRE for the web crawler, I low key advocated for de-indexing pinterest, but didn't get anywhere, (this is unsurprising, I was a nobody there.) I have no insight into why they don't de-index pinterest, but I know pinterest was on the radar as a thing of some sort. Meantime, I just add "-site:pinterest.*" to image queries... which I gather is probably more or less the sort of thing this addon does.
You don't have to answer this if you don't feel like it, but I always wondered if "-site:food.bar" is a search signal against that web site when Google ranks domains.
It's sad, because Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers. I was glad when Quora started to outcompete Yahoo Answers, but now Quora is full of long opinionated diatribes. It's been totally useless to me for the last 3 years.
>Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers
I think that's what they call "damning with faint praise"
Indeed. I did a ctrl-f on the comments to see if someone had mentioned Pinterest already. Basically everyone I know who uses the internet consciously (as opposed to say people like my parents who "click the e on the desktop") would install this if this only came with this one website it blocks, period. And as others wrote not only in an image search, but for all searches. As soon as you search for something that can be vaguely expressed visually (home renovation, clothing, layout, ...) pinterest will somehow force its way into the results.
How could they realistically lose money?
The idea behind pinterest is that unsuspecting users grant it legal immunity and full worldwide free distribution rights on everything that they "upload".
So basically, it's a convenience plugin for copyright infringement. Add some ads to other people's content and you're making money.
Just tried this, and on the first page 2 are non-pinterest, and 7 pinterest of various tld. This pollution makes me hate pinterest with a passion.
w3schools.com used to be crap but recently it just gives you what you need to know right away with a couple of examples without delving into the epistemology of what each object, unlike mdn, w3c and the like. It's the next best thing after stackoverflow when it comes to getting the most likely answers quickly.
W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.
> W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.
Even in that case W3schools is mostly good for getting in the way of the much more useful MDN link that should be the top result.
I agree in theory, they improved and surely the result of improvement should be a stopping of the punishment, but I still can't make myself click the links.
Anyway when I know exactly the method I want I just add mdn to the search to make it come up. Especially because if it is a specific method I probably want a deep dive, not just some examples.
The lack of information in w3s can cause confusion. I had a recent example when looking for an interaction in CSS that seemed completely bonkers to me that was immediately explained in the first paragraph of MDN. I decided to look up how it was documented on w3s (disclaimer: I hate it) and they never even mention it.
Sorry for it not being a concrete example, it was last week and I don't have access to my machine atm.
For me, "delving into epistemology" is critical. A straight-up answer, no explanation given, is next to worthless, as I have nothing to evaluate the correctness, completeness, and usefulness of the answer.
It's also host to a pretty useful experiment page to try things out yourself. It's great for whipping up small scale prototypes with.
my least favorites are the generic "difference between" sites, none of whose domains I can remember at the moment. but they really drive me nuts when I want to find results from people who actually know what they're talking about.
Yes, the ones that say the difference between React and Angular is React has 4,000 GitHub stars. There is a world where "there's no relevant article" is a better answer than... these results.
Precisely due to the existence of these two websites, Quora and cplusplus.com I have a custom Google search engine using a whitelist I created specifically to exclude these and include bloggers from standards committees and other people I follow
A tool that does that on Reddit would be useful too. I don't need commondreams and theroot opinion articles...
commondreams? Are you by chance browsing /r/politics? I find the most useful way to browse /r/politics is to sort by controversial because it pierces the bubble.
/r/politics is just the left version of /r/the_donald, and they're both insufferable.
I miss the niche subs with quality discussion and content, but the rest of Reddit just started overflowing there too and ruined it.
I do not regret deleting my account. Although whenever a web search returns a Reddit link, I don't have RES and old.* redirect to make the site usable any more. Don't know how anyone uses new Reddit.
You're better off just installing something like Boost or Baconreader on your phone to take care of Reddit links from searches. I haven't touched Reddit on a desktop system in over a year because it's just easier to use an app and not have to deal with the ridiculously awful redesign or fiddle with RES.
There are still some useful niche communities. r/bonsai is still about bonsai and relatively meme free. r/amateurradio is ok too
If you're searching just the one site then the site: prefix (e.g. site:reddit.com, site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>) works a treat.
Yes, That's the one! You create a set of rules and you can publicly publish your url. I have one specifically for programming related searches and one for news.
You can have URL patterns for example: en.cppreference.com/<asterisk>
Edit: I wasn't able to get the star to work in the post
Somewhat, but it's more about explanations and implementations of common algorithms that appear in interviews etc. Unfortunately, everything outside the algorithms is very low-effort SEO content. I'd be happy excluding it from my search results and only go there when I need to look up a specific algorithm.
Don't forget Stackshare. One of the most disgusting tech spam websites of all time.
I don't think you ever stop learning C++... :)
But I trust cppreference more for the details, which are often necessary for C++ because, well, the devil's in the details. (And to be totally honest, the styling is just nicer.)
Compare the docs for std::vector for example, cplusplus[0] and cppreference[1]. The former spends three paragraphs explaining the internals, whereas the latter only spends one. The latter also includes information about what's been introduced on which language version (11, 17, 20) and assorted facts that the former doesn't discuss, e.g. the various container contracts that vector fulfills.
I also used cplusplus.com a lot when learning, and (as far as I can tell) it's basically fine, but cppreference.com has been my go-to for quite a while now. The latter is subjectively more complete/precise/helpful to me (and it's just as a good a reference for C, which is actually what I mostly use it for).
I'm curious what saagarjha's experience is, too.
cplusplus.com just has worse information; it annoys me because it outranks cppreference.com and I have never been the the former and said "gee, I'm glad I came here because it had better details".
Nothing, it's a fine reference. But I could see people wanting to skip it in the top results.
And pinterest, expertsexchange and a bunch of others. Right now I blackhole them in the DNS, being able to strip them out of serps is a great idea, it puts the lie to Google serving you what you want though.
I'm really surprised to see Mayo Clinic on here. It's one of the few trustworthy sources of medical info on the internet.
In my experience, Mayo Clinic and several other similar sites are ranked far too highly by Google for the paltry information they offer. I can somewhat understand why Google has chosen to deliberately suppress more information-rich sources like Wikipedia specifically for medical queries, but I find it to be extremely annoying. When I search for information about a disease online, I'm usually not trying to use Google as a substitute for asking my doctor, and I don't appreciate Google trying to funnel me to sites that are dumbed down. My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.
> My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.
OK, I see the problem, and I'm not sure how Google can solve it. The problem is that you are unlike the vast majority of other Google users. Most of the time someone is searching for an illness, it's because they think they (or someone they know) has it. Mayo Clinic is great for that.
I personally sometimes search for more detail, but then I usually go directly to Wikipedia (which has as much info as a layperson like me can understand, but much more than Mayo Clinic).
I can't wait until I get home and try this. I am completely sick to death of Google image search results being full of videos. It's impossible to find an actual gif to imbed in an HTML comment post because the results are drowning in videos from Giphy, Tenor, etc. It'll be so delicious to consign them to oblivion.
Edit: unfortunately it doesn't work on image search. Oh well.
Thank you so much for this. Was looking for something similar, found only solutions that were dependent on extensions I didn't want to install due to privacy/security reasons.
Thanks. Same here and I tried to keep it as vanilla as possible. Let me know if and I can improve it (either here or using Github issues).
Can we have the option of not showing the removed results? Or maybe just show small notification on top "some results were removed by Wiper, click here to show them"?
Otherwise some search results might still be plagued with offenders, though admittingly their presence is much more sufferable.
Apparently some people prefer the fact that the results are not fully removed. I have a better idea- to let the users decide it, so for v.1.0 I'm going to take these two ideas into account: 1. CSS-ify to suppress the results, 2. Remove them fully.
Firstly, thank you for building this I have exactly the same itch and I'm so glad someone provided a way to scratch it.
> The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
Could you explain a little more about how the stripping of the 'blacklist' works.
OK, I suppose I could be slightly less lazy and read the source, which shows that you're iterating through the blacklist then iterating through the results page and removing elements that match. There are some default offenders blacklisted automatically by the look of it, nice and simple.
var blacklist = new RegExp('https?:\/\/.*\.(geeksforgeeks|tutorialspoint).*\.*'); function clearURLs(urls) { var i, j, arr, res, url; arr = []; res = document.querySelectorAll('div.rc'); for (i = 0; i < res.length; i++) { for (j = 0; j < urls.blacklistURLs.length; j++) { if (res[i].firstChild.firstChild.getAttribute('href').indexOf(urls.blacklistURLs[j]) !== -1) { arr.push(i); } } } arr = [...new Set(arr)]; for (i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) { url = res[arr[i]].firstChild.firstChild.getAttribute('href'); url = 'Wiper blacklisted URL: <a href="' + url + '">' + url + '</a>'; res[arr[i]].parentElement.innerHTML = url; } } browser.storage.local.get('blacklistURLs').then(clearURLs);
And I just recently looked for something like this because I'm sick and tired of Google top-ranking results from Reddit, where someone asked an intelligent question, and there were zero responses. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an actually-useful response to a technical question on Reddit, but a link to a targeted subreddit always seems to be at the top of my search results now. I wonder how much this is costing Reddit. I hope it's a lot, and they stop this nonsense soon.
You sure that, reddit buys its place?
I rather suspect this has to do with the search algorithm favors known and big domains in the ever going on war against scam and fake sites.
I too have noticed the big 3 search engines serving more *eddit links than usual. And without retyping the url, (old.) the comments are hidden anyway so they are effectively a shade worse than useless.
You can add:
-site:example.com
To your query to exclude all results from example.com
Then, you can configure your search bar to automatically add those terms to your query.
But that way you'd be avoiding the results completely(even in the unlikely event that they could be potentially helpful)
Amazing! Thanks!
We need this for YouTube as well, though the blacklist would be extremely large.
In fact, I wonder if this could be implemented as a filter list for uBlock Origin?
When I log out, YouTube becomes total trash, so I thought the algorithm was really customized to me. Then I visited a friend to watch some movies and saw half our recommendations were identical. Like we got placed in the same "bucket" or something.
I remember reading something that said is how spotify makes discover weekly playlists (but I can't find it now), so I wouldn't be too surprised
Which domains would you recommend adding to the blacklist for a HN crowd? It would be nice if this had some presets builtin.
Wonderful idea. I find google to be marginally useful. Mostly though it returns a barrage of low quality results like mentioned here in the comments, that might be related but you really don't ever want to see. Obvious though it'll never be allowed on chrome's web store.
This used to be built-in to google itself. You could choose to block a site from future results from any results page. But they killed it, along with forum search, code search, usenet search, and so many other useful things.
Yes, my first thought upon reading the post was "doesn't Google already offer this?" Didn't realise they'd killed it.
I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine these days and I'm actually reasonably happy with it. The results used to be laughably bad but they've really improved lately.
Sadly, the one thing where DDG is usually crap is for anything code-related, especially if I'm searching for something very specific like an error message or an obscure library. That's when I have to jump back to Google (well, actually Startpage.)
Regarding DDG, I have noticed that recently it has started to suggest a ton of porn, even for totally unrelated searches.
As an experiment I just typed in the first thing that came to my mind: "thorn in cat's paw". One of the results is "Cat porn videos", on the very first page! And this is far from the worst case I've encountered...
Glad this has been brought up. I noticed it a while ago and wanted to post it here every time someone falsely repeats how great DDG is, but couldn't recall any of the searches.
With safe search moderate, which is default in private windows, I don't think I should be getting hardcore porn results even if I'm searching for hardcore porn terms.
Aside from that, 99% (or maybe all) of my searches are "not many sites contain what you want to see, so here's a ton of other shit to wade through", necessitating another tedious, furious click to get what I asked for.
Not many results contain covid? Okay. The only reason to DDG is to add !g or !s or even !b to every search.
Did you turn off safe search? I don't get porn with these search terms. Unless I turn off the porn filter.
As I do not know, what DDG subsumes under "objectionable material" (apart from it being "mostly adult"), yes. It was never a problem until recently, some sites seem to have stepped up their SEO game.
DDG just recommends the british TV series 'Thorne' after I disable the safe search ...?
AS I said in a post above, I've been using TamperMonkey[1] and a userscript[2] to do this. Reading the [virtually non-existent] description of the uBlacklist plugin, it seems to offer the same thing. Now I'm wondering if there's any reason to prefer an extension over a userscript [or vice versa]?
ASIDE: whatever the merits of this particular extension, I think the choice of name is a pretty snidey attempt by the developer to cash in on the popularity of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
uBlacklist can also filter results on Duck Duck Go and Startpage (it's in settings if you go to chrome://extensions/ find uBlacklist, click on it, scroll to the bottom and click "Extension options"), but I've never tried it.
Confirmed working on DDG (text search only) and Startpage (both text and images), tested on Firefox.
This is a great idea! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it beforehand! I looked through your code and it looks like you replace the HTML of the page. Have you considered appending "-site:<blacklisted url> -site:<blacklisted url>...etc" to the end of the search query instead? This way, the user still gets a full page of relevant search results.
I'm not sure how flexible extensions are, but maybe you could intercept all request attempts to google search, append the blacklisted URLs to the search query, then hide them on the loaded page so that the user doesn't have to see the long list of appended, blacklisted URLs.
Thanks. No that has the potential issue of assuming that results from your blacklist are complete crap. That'd be equivalent of removing the search results based on the blacklist entirely (right?). Based on a comment here on HN as well, I think that's not necessarily a good idea. You don't know what you don't know, so may be a blacklisted website may return a valid result (unlikely but probable, so I'm letting that assumption be there).
And feel free to contribute on Github if you like :)
It removes all blacklisted URLs from the search results. Isn't that what your extension does?
Ah, so it's actually not entirely removing blacklisted results, it's just condensing those results. Personally, I think I'd be more interested in nabakin's idea of editing the query before it gets sent to Google.
Although - like zargon says in a top-level comment - this clearly should just be built into search engines themselves. The only semi-legitimate reason I can think of that they wouldn't be is that results for a given query would be even less reproducible than they already are from person-to-person. But since Google already "personalizes" results, I don't think that's really a factor for them. They could just have a little button at the bottom that says "3 results from sites you've blacklisted - wanna see them?" or whatever.
Since the results are customized anyway, they should also give us a way to assign more or less weight to a result and learn from that for future search queries.
Google News does this on every link (Hide stories from XXX, More stories like this, Fewer stories like this) so clearly the feature exists.
I am thinking about more customization, especially this that allows the user to 1. suppress (like now) or 2. remove the results entirely. But in my defence, it was a weekend project for a noob like me.
Agreed, that'd be excellent. It's too bad that it doesn't really seem like Google's MO to give us those kinds of levers in Search.
I actually have a keyworded URL in my Firefox bookmarks for that, IIRC there is a limit (a very low one if you really want to get rid of all the spam options) for how many sites you can block this way
Honestly, at this point Google themselves should be offering this.
Not only would it keep people coming back for actually valuable results, but it would feed them with an up-to-the minute listing of sites people don't trust.
Even better, let people subscribe to block lists, like ad blockers do. Instead of putting together my own list of shit sites (which will be perpetually out of date), I'd be happy to outsource that to some group I trust.
It's an enhancement issue I've already added to the repository on Github. Planning to roll it out in the next update :) Honestly, I didn't know how big of a pain it was to a lot of people until now.
!! I've used Google since the early early days, and either I missed that entirely, or tried it once and didn't actually need it until recently.
+10 points for bringing the facts.
As someone who just graduated college and found geeksforgeeks, cplusplusreference, and w3schools quite helpful for Algorithms, c++ Syntax, and learning some basic web design stuff (respectively).....what should I be using? I see a lot of people hating on them....but they all seemed alright to me. Is it just because they are too basic? (I used a lot of these things for just learning basic things I either forgot the syntax for or needed a quick introduction).
I'd especially like to know for c++.
The complaints about these sites is usually that (a) they're literally wrong just often enough that you don't want to rely on them, which defeats the point of a reference, or (b) they try to "teach" things that are not recommended best practices. With w3schools in particular, there's the added "ick" that they try very hard to make it look like they're an offical W3C source, and sell scammy certifications based on that confusion. They also provided (past tense, because I haven't looked at it in years) some very questionable practices with PHP that would lead to trivially insecure code.
cppreference.com is what I usually use for C++. It's well organized, well cross-linked, and uses exact standards language whenever possible. It's also very good about showing the differences between successive versions of the C++ standard libraries, which is invaluable if you're working with any sort of legacy code and wondering why something looks funny.
For HTML5/JS, MDN (Mozilla) was my default when I did front-end, but it's been a little while. I'm sure Mozilla is still great, but there might also be something easier to traverse.
Ahhhh.....you know what, now that I think about it, I remember last semester for a class I had to do a bunch of PHP + SQL for a Backend (my first time really using either). I basically just googled a bunch of stuff and I ended up just writing the queries in as strings basically because that's what I saw on a site (very possibly one of the ones in question).
I felt it was wrong because I was concerned about SQL injection, but my professor really didn't care about security so I wasn't too too concerned. Later on my professor mentioned that pre-compiled statements (I think that's what they are called) and I facepalmed because that would have been way more secure and been 5x easier anyways.
So yea, I guess they still are giving bad advice.
The're basic but that's not the real problem. Plenty of articles are basic but also offer unique perspective or insight. The real problem is that these articles are often uninspired and seemingly only written for the purpose of writing an article. Full of keywords to maximize google search potential. And then your technical search gets bogged down by these SEO friendly articles and you can't find what you need.
Its a lot worse for python than, say, kotlin. That was one of the biggest things I noticed when changing languages recently.
If I installed this extension, cplusplus.com would be the very first thing to go on my blacklist. I always want cppreference.com.
This should already have been part of Google itself. Some sites come up high far too frequently for certain searches of mine, and it's never the best info.
I like that this doesn't completely blow away the result, but I do kind of wish is was further de-emphasized. Maybe smaller font or faded text.
Yes, it was a part of Google search. I guess they removed it because not many people were using it. Too bad I was a big fan of this feature.
I'm pretty sure it use to be, I remember searching for something like this years ago and stumbling upon a comment saying it had recently stopped that offering.
The two issues I have with Google search recent: first, I often get results, when searching for something technical which look like they have huge potential, a sentence with my search terms in, amongst a technical looking paragraph, with a URL, at first glance, that looks good, I click on it and it attempts to take over the browser with spam, redirects etc, I then realize the domain had random characters before the end, but I wonder how such terrible results end up on Google. I want to ban these sites from my searches. Secondly, unrelated to this extension, recently, Google have started popping up a box with other search terms I may be interested in, just after the search loads, within the search results, and the amount of times I have gone to click, only to be last minute intercepted by a link in this box which suddenly appears is unreal. Anyone else get that?
To your second point, yes, all the time and it's infuriating. You either need to slow down how you use the search results page, or they appear from nowhere just as you're trying to click the second link.
What's worse is I then berate myself mentally as I know that Google has some metric on how many times these suggestions get clicked, and there's some product owner somewhere saying "wow!, x% of users use these suggestions, let's keep this feature!"
Never experienced the latter; but couldn't agree more on the first issue. Actually if you'd not articulated it I'd have thought it was only me. These (farm?) have super awesome titles and content description but then takes to (ph|f)ishy pages. Usually happens to me when I search "[Ebook Title] download". Interestingly of the late I don't see a lot of them after coming to Europe (and see Google mentioning some GDPR compliance related omissions).
This might be useful to blacklist some of the shopping results when you want facts and not shopping results. Sometimes I google "how does X work" type questions, and I get pages of links of things I should buy. The top stuff are obvious ads, but the non-ad results are basically shopping sites, too. That's mean of Google. They're our main source of information ("How does X work") and instead they want to redirect you to shopping because .. they can.
I notice -shopping helps... magically. But not enough.
Maybe the blacklist is the right idea. Can there be a magic incantation to exclude or include groups of blacklisted sites on a whim?
Great work! I actually made something similar 15 years ago with a P2P social networking angle: You could hide/promote results based on your friends' reccomendations.
Check out some old screenshots from Firefox version 1.0: http://getoutfoxed.com/screenshots
It went viral on del.icio.us and let to me taking venture funding to found www.lijit.com, which lives on now as http://sovrn.com/
This is very inspirational! Actually I have something similar in mind- 1. to allow subscribing to friend's or network's lists. and/or 2. Make it a 'window' to your search experience. So it's privacy focused personal/social logic that offers you Google or any search engine that way you prefer. I think PageRank is not enough (or may be too much) for me...
This is a really cool idea. I wish something like that would exist as a Pinboard Extension. Where it just decorates your search results with information about if your friends have it bookmarked, your tags or even blacklist domains if tagged as blacklist:domain or something on Pinboard by you or your friends. Would be a nice way to make use of that data.
Good bye corporate news from my search results! I am so fed up with a bunch of news articles always crowding out the top results for nearly every search query. No more having to wade though propaganda soup to find the things i want.
This extension comes at a good time. Just a couple of weeks ago I was wondering how search would feel if you'd remove all news sites (mainstream and otherwise).
I would so love to have a search engine setting in which I could remove the top 500 web properties from my search, or have similar parameters to help remove large swaths information that I'm not interested in looking at.
We really should bring back OpenSearch which is/was a way for sites to expose a search URL to browsers (like RSS URLs). You'd then directly query those sites rather than going to the middleman (Google or other search engines). Only that sites exposing OpenSearch URLs probably aren't prepared to be queried by meta crawlers and huge query loads will bring them down rather quickly I guess. The quality of search results on both Google and alternatives is shockingly poor; I can't find documents I used to find only three years ago. I, too, wonder if Google has just lost interest in fighting SEO spam. But I find it hard to believe that they aren't all over their cash cow so I have to conclude they send you to the sites with the most AdWords and Google analytics crap on purpose. At which point Google's search results can be used as a pretty good negative filter I guess ;) Interesting times ahead for search engines.
Thank you! I was searching for an add-on like this a few months ago. When I search for tech support issues I get a lot of SEO spam blogs that have no useful information now I can finally filter them out.
Please make one for Bing. I gave up on Google search about half a year ago initially for all searches that could yield politically incorrect results, but then for all technical searches as well due to these spammy sites. Bing technical search is definitely higher quality and the general results are more politically neutral, but it still needs your extension. I currently find Firefox/Bing to be the most effective combination.
I never personally used Bing much (but memes have told me the same about its search quality). I will take into consideration for the next execution.
I have been also mildly pissed at Youtube results and given how permeated it is into a 'learner's' life, I have been thinking about Youtube too. But in that case I'll have to take more usability into account to allow for right-click>add_to_blacklist kind of thing since there are so many low-quality ad-loaded channels.
I think Bing is better than Google when it comes to NSFW stuff (friend told me) and probably Image Search
I'll second this experience. Bing news has become markedly more curated recently, imo. But it's still miles ahead of Google with respect to treating you like an adult capable of critically engaging with information.
It seems kinda ridiculous that such a obvious and extremely useful idea hadn't been made yet, I cant wait to use it!
Bravo! Thanks so much or developing this.
Any reason you chose to do this as a Firefox plugin rather than a Greasemonkey (or similar) script? Not judging, just wondering.
1. My hatred for Chrome (kind of recent HN influence) led me into Firefox first and foremost hence Firefox. Even though I'll be porting it to Chrom(ium-e) soon. 2. It could be my attitude but I thought writing ground up vanilla would be much easier than learning a new tool, i.e., I know Greasemonkey only as much as in its name and nothing else about its workflow. 2.1 I guess an addon is easier to distribute/install (?).
This does look interesting, but it requires much more permissions and personally I hesitate to grant those for any non-monitored extension.
you might as well preload this with Pinterest, that is precisely what I and most people will be using this ext for
I got sick of seeing links to sites I knew I never wanted to visit (or couldn't due to pay/sign-up walls) and accidentally clicking them, so I made something similar to this for myself, but it applies to all sites.
It's terrible to configure because it was only intended for personal use. The only reason it's in the add-on repository at all is the annoying fact you can't reasonably use a locally installed add-on.
i use search keywords for everything, but i have the following custom keyword for google image search (this is firefox, though i believe it works for chrome too if you create one and manually edit it):
it strips out all results from pinterest and youtube thumbnails. though with the lack of direct image links i've been leaning more on ddg and bing these days.
Coincidentally, I have been working on a similar Chrome/Opera extension.
It works for Google, Yahoo!, Bing, DuckDuckGo and a few others, but I haven't finished it or packaged it up to submit to Google yet. Some rough edges and lots of TODOs still.
Anyway, it's here if anyone is interested in the code or would like to collaborate: https://github.com/daverayment/SearchHide
Thank you! Just curious, is there any reason why "Wiper blacklisted URL: <URL>" need to be shown instead of a cleaner removal?
You mean why not fully remove the URL? That's just in the odd case you really do want to visit the link (after Google think that it's a good result). May be example.com happens to be the ONLY website that does have some good content, I personally wouldn't want to ban it entirely. But in every case, I'd like to strip their results so I won't have to scroll down to get to the good results.
First thing that came to my mind, is this the next-gen ad blocking?
Interesting project and I think I am on board with it. Google search results have declined a lot in the last 2 years, mostly because of oversaturation by brands that have been playing the SEO game for years.
It's getting increasingly harder to land on pages that have been written by someone without a strict interest in search engine traffic.
I wonder is there extension that would do exactly opposite, only include google results from sites that i choose in order that i want.
Ordering is something that I'm not sure about (but I've myself been thinking about it for a future addon- if not the current one) that would 'weigh' the URLs like .edu/wikipedia etc. much higher. Would such a feature be helpful to you? And as a part of the same addon?
As for only results from specific websites, you may use Google Operators (like inurl, site, etc.)
Yeah, I'm looking for something like this too. I would like to have Wikipedia at the top of the results.
Well doesn't give order, but "cake site:news.ycombinator.com" will give search for keyword "cake" only on HN.
At one point google had this as a chrome extension and as a built in feature to the search itself. Both are now dead for some reason
I like the idea, although I personally won't be using it, I really like that it exists.
From a "freedom" perspective, I think individuals are free to impose their own filters but generally the default should be unrestricted access. That would possibly be with the caveat of the provably vulnerable (children, mental disabilities, etc).
Keep up the good work!
for those who dont know about native search filters, appending "-domain.tld" to a regular search query also works
"-domain.tld" has the side-effect that it'd not get any results from those domains then; which might not be a good idea (at least in 1% of those cases when say "-domain.tld" might be what exactly you're looking for".
This is absolutely fantastic. Similarly frustrated with sites gaming SEO with near rubbish results or bare minimum content.
I created an add-on which replaces !s with inurl:stackoverflow.com to replicate the bangs of duckduckgo in Google.
How come not site:stackoverflow.com? Is this just a different way of doing the same thing? I've never heard of the inurl: flag
inurl filters so that the result URLs must contain the keyword specified. So inurl:w3 would only show results where w3 is in the URL. It works for this use case but it's better to just use site like you mentioned.
You can't even fully rely on those operatorsike site: anymore because Google now happily serves you results from miscreants that tag their scam site urls with valid site names, so instead of getting results from only let's say mozilla.org, you also now get them from their scamsite because they appended the actual mozilla site url into their own.
Are you sure that happens with site and not inurl? That's a big bug. Do you have an example?
Me too. It's been great
I've also cobbled together a Tampermonkey script which I wittily call "HackerChoose" which allows me to similarly block domains from appearing on HN. Unfortunately my JS-foo isn't up to making it interactive, so I have to manually update the list of banned domains. But, if anyone's interested, here it is:
This actual Tampermonkey stub script imports the full userscript from a location elsewhere on my hard drive. This makes it easier to maintain the list of banned domains by editing that imported file directly, rather than having to make edits from within Tampermonkey's clunky interface:
https://pastebin.com/raMSWMDi
This is the imported userscript. I pretty much lifted it from one someone else had made and then twiddled it a bit. So apologies to whoever the original author was, but I've forgotten where I got it, so can't give you the credit:
https://pastebin.com/SbtfXEby
I don't believe you can accomplish precisely what this does with uBO. You can blacklist your browser itself from connecting to certain domains with uBO but you can't fully remove them from within a google search results page since the google results page isn't explicitly connecting to the domains, just displaying links to do so.
Even with some advanced cosmetic rules the most you could do is remove the <a> tag fields, not the full title/text of the results.
If you can select the <a> tag, then you can likely use a procedural cosmetic filter to go up the DOM like with :upward(n). So this should be possible.
Google search sucks so hard these days. Absurdly shitty.
Needs to be unfucked via antitrust IMO they have lost their way.
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if a legitimate competitor emerged? It's not like antitrust legislation significantly raised the quality of Microsoft's software in the 90s.
Sorry to hijack this thread but does anyone know of any extension that blocks / strips certain kinds of content.
Use case: I am as guilty of mindless browsing as the next person but seeing news / click-bait headlines about certain celebs like the kardashians makes my blood boil.
uBlock Origin has custom filters you can use. I'm guilty of the exact same thing (just not the same sites). Here's a sample of what I use:
The first blocks YT entirely. The second blocks URL loads (if you load the URL directly) AND SPA redirects. I mostly use these to use YT only for content I subscribe to and avoid the algorithms by impulse or accident. Note that not all SPAs work the same, so you'd have to do some digging. For example, 9Gag doesn't redirect from the same API endpoint but instead uses payload data, so it's more difficult to block that. You can still block direct pageloads, but not SPA redirects, so for sites like that you may want to just block the entire domain.
I have a small list of content I try to avoid using this, mostly Reddit subs and "main" pages like r/all or r/popular. With this in mind, my ideal YT & reddit feeds are only content I explicitly want to see.
Else, I'd recommend a feed curator like Feedly. You can set up custom site feeds and so you'll only see those. I started using it after Firefox killed its RSS. This way there's no algorithm except popularity of a given link from a feed, not what is on the feed at all. So the onus of balance is still on you, but way easier.
If I may be frank it sounds like a deeper problem than browsing certain sites. May want to work on impulse control and contemplate why you are driven to these sites in the first place.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't get what this is doing. How did the Google search results get inside some other URL?
I tried to watch the animation to understand, but it's too low resolution for me to read.
It basically lets you create a list of blacklisted URLs and then any Google search results that matches against these URLs is stripped to the bare URL alone. The screenshot on the Firefox Addons page is of a much better quality.
I love this! Semi-related, I was just fiddling with a Firefox extension this morning to flip Python 2 documentation results with those of Python 3 (usually also in the results, but lower on the page)
Sorry to be a pedant here, but I think a title of "Show HN: A Firefox add-on to strip Google search results _of_ 'blacklisted' URLs" is much more clear.
Don't think I've ever wanted to install an extension so fast. There are so, so many domains that I am content to literally never see in search results...
Blocking Pinterest results in image search was my first thought with this extension. That's disappointing if it doesn't, will test myself now.
Google has a similar built-in feature today, just add "-" before the domain you don't want to see. For example:
html a tag -w3schools.com
So basically block 70% of all results from first and second page? Google has turned into a defective product.
answers.microsoft.com
I'd blacklist that. Rarely if ever has an actual answer to the question asked in my experience and for some reason comments seem to get duplicated.
I'm not aware about other similar tools. But I'll be soon porting and submitting on Chrome as well.
I use Tampermonkey[1] with the "Google Hit Hider by Domain"[2] plugin to de-crapify my search results.
In spite of the name, it works on all search engine sites I've tried it on; Google, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, Qwant. It adds a "Block" button beside each search result which allows you to block sites from appearing in that particular search result. Or to 'perma-ban' them from ever showing in future search results.
No affiliation. Just a satisfied customer.
[1] https://www.tampermonkey.net
[2] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
Unfortunately it can't do anything about search results returning precisely the opposite of what you searched for; eg.
SEARCH: "How to completely uninstall XXX from YYY"
RESULT: "How to install XXX on ZZZ"
SEARCH: "How to completely +uninstall -install +XXX +from -on +YYY -ZZZ
RESULT: "Install YYY on ZZZ with this howto"
[Insert sound of computer being thrown across room]
And, while I'm on the subject, my tuppence worth for the list. Fucking You-fucking-Tube being returned as the first dozen search results for some crappy one liner which you've forgotten and need to look up quickly...
SEARCH: "cheatsheet keyboard shortcut for function Z in app Y"
WHAT I WANT THE SEARCH TO RETURN: "App Y Keyboard shortcut cheatsheet"
WHAT THE SEARCH ACTUALLY RETURNS: [almost an entire page of] "Take zen ninja mastery of Application Y in minutes by learning this arse-sum keyboard shortcut!" --a 45 minute unedited epic, filmed by a monosyllabic arsehole on a shaking, continually auto-focussing phone camera, orientated vertically. Featuring 20 minutes of "er... um... well..." mumbling at the beginning, telling the viewer how "arse-sum" this keyboard shortcut is going to be --if the fucker ever gets around to actually showing you it!
Followed by the actual clicking of the shortcut which the narrator manages to do while the camera is pointed at the wrong part of the screen and out of focus.
Under the box on the righthand side there's a link with the text "See more on Stock Overflow"
Obviously a just small typo but I suppose I'm surprised this text was typed by a human in the first place. FWIW it's spelled correctly just above.
Good eye, thank you. It is fixed.
Every "Deep Search" is manually tuned and added as a search within the search, and each one is slightly different depending on the type of information that data source returns.
I use Yandex Browser [Chromium-based] so, unfortunately, FireMonkey isn't an option.
The article you linked to is quite vague as to what the security implications might be. It says that FireMonkey extensions run in a sandbox. But you're still being asked the usual "This extension wants to see and modify your data on all websites.." [or whatever the exact wording is]. So, you're still letting the installed scripts have access to your browsing.
One good thing about <whatever>Monkey and userscripts is that they make it trivially easy to inspect the scripts and see what exactly is being done. Whereas a browser extension is more of a 'black box'. So, there is more potential to spot potentially nefarious code in a userscript.js.
For some reason the usescript script only works with Violentmonkey but not FireMonkey for me. (FF 76.0.1)
Tampermonkey is the one that has privacy issues but what's the problem with Violentmonkey?
Well that does sound like a typical query I would not use Google for.
Generally Google gets the questions where I feel like I'm an idiot for asking, or when I feel like the question is best answered as if one were an idiot. Don't worry about spelling or formulation. Google gets to flex its AI "I know what you want" muscles, and you get an answer without having to think about the question very much.
I don't get any videos: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cheat%20sheet%20functi...
>You-f*ing-Tube being returned as the first dozen search results for some crappy one liner which you've forgotten and need to look up quickly
Since Google can monetize YouTube results, I'm afraid this is only going to get worse.
> SEARCH: "cheatsheet keyboard shortcut for function Z in app Y"
Maybe worthwhile to document these on a GH markdown file or contribute cheat sheets to DuckDuckGo.
It is probably just me, but I have noticed a marked drop in rank for Stack Overflow links in search results, even on programming-type questions.
If in fact this is more of a general trend and not my little bubble, then I wonder if this is caused by Stack Overflow mods closing any question that may have an opinion in the answer and since these answers have not shown activity for years, perhaps other links and sites are slowly starting to eat SO's lunch.
Pure speculation on my side.
I would take a wild guess that it's less of Stack Overflow's actions and more that Stack Overflow's shitacular competition takes the highest ranked questions and SEOs the shit out of them to point to less useful more-malvertised sites
I'm no expert, but I can imagine that for sites like Google, Twitter, etc, having a blocklist adds a little complexity, but at their scale, a lot of CPU cycles in overhead. I'm pretty simple in my thought processes though, I'm just thinking that they'd need a unique query for every user, assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user?
> assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user?
Google search doesn't work like this anymore. Search results for everyone are custom based on what they know about your. For example check out filter bubbles[1]. A blacklist would probably help their models. As for why it got removed we can only guess. I'm guessing it has to do with either bad UX (if you forgot you added domains they will never show up) or them wanting to be in full control of your search experience.
[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...
The SEO community tried to game the shit out of the blacklist feature.
People with 1000 fake accounts were charging to blacklist a specific domain. Because so few actual search users made use of the feature, it didn't take many accounts to impact search rank. So that feature had a short lifespan.
I don't understand what you mean. The blacklist feature was for an individual to avoid sites they didn't want to see. It wouldn't affect page rank, so what would be the advantage of paying someone to blacklist it in their own settings?
But you can still do it with search operators? It's just more inconvenient but the feature is still there. Doubt that was why
Besides that, they can just stop using the blacklist as a signal for their results, but keep the feature.
> Anybody else here remembers times when Google search supported blocking domains in personal setting?
from memory, the period when this feature actually worked, wasn't very long?
but I agree about the advanced search operators, and just generally paying better attention to my keywords.
Out of curiosity, what do you prefer over StackOverflow? Official documentation, blogs...?
That was just an example based on some comment around here -- quite surprising for me. Personally I even mostly prefer SO for majority of "quick/shallow/how-do-I" technical questions and I think my google persona is well attuned for this. Back in times I've been blocking w3schools.com (very rarely seen in my SERPs nowadays, and seems they somewhat improved over time) and expertsexchange.com (:shivers:). For web platform docs I primarily use `%s site:developer.mozilla.org` in Google and devdocs.io for the rest.
I wrote this because I was so annoyed by irrelevant low-quality search results for my queries on Google. For instance if I'm looking up for Python xyz topic, 99% of the times I am not interested in some 'low-quality' content (based on my personal preferences) from website example.com.
The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
When you search for a file extension, almost always those useless sites pop up that are just advertisements for a ``driver manager" or ``registry cleaner". The justsolve wiki[1] is a pretty good resource for file extensions, but it's not popular enough yet to rank high in search results.
[1]: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/
After looking into it a bit it seems like a good resource, but a few tweaks would be handy:
- TLS would improve the site ranking and make it look much more serious. These days plain HTTP is just a red flag.
- "This Site's URL is permanently http://fileformats.archiveteam.org!" is the first thing I see. That's just weird. Who actually cares? And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user? This is just confusing and makes the site look like it hasn't changed since the 90s.
- "First Time Visiting This Wiki? Please read the Statement of Project to understand why this project exists. Then check out the FAQ for some frequently asked questions about the project and its goals and procedures. Finally, brush up on the guidelines for Editing." Err, no, that's not what any first time user would do, that's what power users might do.
I imagine that right now, it's mostly an internal site for people involved in Archive Team to build out content, and there's an intent to actually publish this as something end users might find useful later.
I'm a first time user and I looked at those pages and found it pretty valuable since the site itself isn't really clear.
I'd expect a site like this to have a big list of extensions on the first page.
> And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user?
In my URL bar right now. It requires a browser that respects one's intelligence.
The justsolve wiki is actually really valuable and good information, but the name always makes me think it's a spam site.
For me it's the stackoverflow and github comment scrapers. They often clutter up my results greatly.
I hate those, but they're so many that you'd need a community maintained list to keep track of them all…
Would there really be enough revenue to warrant doing this, considering 1) scraping and hosting that content requires some effort, 2) the content would (should?) be penalized for plagiarism so they would have very little traffic and 3) developers are probably the worst audience to try and monetize with ads due to the prevalence of ad blockers.
Most people who code are not developers.
Mine and my partners parents learned c (badly) at some point. Nearly everyone on the b2b customer support team at my last job could sling some js. A surprising number of marketers learn to wrangle some carousels/buttons/etc. vba script excel monster stories are prevalent.
These people are great to monetize. They are paid well and doing something they don't understand well.
I see them in search results often enough (sometimes even before the SO post they've scraped) that it seems to be working, and the search engines (both DDG and Google for me) haven't caught on.
> and the search engines haven't caught on.
Sure they have. They just don't care as long as they made their quick buck off of it.
The data is provided as a downloadable dump, so it's really just a basic read only CMS.
Pinterest is somehow getting its tentacles beyond image search now, too. I was recently researching interior paint colours and if I do a search like "interior colours dark walls" (NOT image search) then of the first 10 results there are 3(!!) Pinterest results from three different domains - .com, .co.nz and .co.uk (I'm sure your results will differ based on your region).
It's incredible to me that Google isn't doing SOMETHING to prevent Pinterest from duking their results, and actually seems to be losing ground to Pinterest's SEO dark patterns.
Of the remaining 6 results on that page, 3 of them were low-quality articles with generic language about paint schemes and lots of images, ALL of which had those little Pinterest share badges on them. I don't know it for a fact, but I strongly suspect that these ubiquitous types of websites are either produced in Pinterest's own content mills or are paid for by Pinterest marketing teams.
I really dont get how they've gotten away with it this long. Google killed off eHow relatively quickly after we started doing our shady SEO practices but yet...
I have a feeling it's not SEO, but that Google themselves are favoring more domains over another based on a hidden factor. If you search for recipes you get the same thing, a bunch of results from big media organizations but very few (or none at all) results from smaller forums, self-run sites etc.
If I were to put my cynical tinfoil hat on, I would say Google has optimized a lot of search results to be favored towards sites which heavily advertise/track their users. Google results are no longer "search term" being matched to "content" but there are additional layers which do more magic, like "is this publisher considered favorable or trustworthy to Google" and "will this result generate a positive ROI for Google".
I... did not know this. It's good to know that Google is also responsible for killing the non-corporate web alongside Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps more insidiously.
This is (i think) also happening with youtube. There were a bunch of funny political videos a couple of years ago (eg. "Trump insult compilaton" etc., from different independent individuals), and searching for those terms now just shows videos from CNN, BBC, ABC, CNBC, and other corporate media houses.
That's a very cynical take away from a document saying expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are the most important measures of page quality.
I can see how forums would take a hit because users are anonymous, but personal blogs and niche websites should be rated high. Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines. This would seem to go more so for niche websites as demonstrated expertise should be more apparent.
Note that site reputation was listed as the very least important metric.
I doubt anyone else read all 168 pages, but can you direct me to the page that supports your claim? I didn't find anything that I would qualify as "directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites."
> Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines.
That is pretty exclusive, IMO.
Obviously I haven't read this whole thing during my lunch break but if what you say is true then it explains a lot about why search quality has suffered the last ten years.
Forums, personal blogs and niche websites are often exactly what I want.
Because to optimize the analytics, you optimize the site for analytics and inherently give Google more detailed data. There's no way Google isn't using that data.
The incentives are aligned for Google to do this. I'd like to believe that they don't.
Can you point to anything that might convince skeptical non-Googlers that Google does not do this?
Goddamn Pinterest. No I don't want to sign up for Pinterest just to look at this pic that Google Image Search thinks is available to the general internet!
WTF Google how do you still allow this crap?
I haven't needed that, it just works when I click on the picture then right click on the drill down.
If you right click on the larger image that appears in the dark sidebar popout in Chrome(ium), and select 'View image..' that also works (most of the time).
Problem with that is you'll be downloading the Google cached image, not the source imagine, so the quality is usually worse.
When I worked for google as SRE for the web crawler, I low key advocated for de-indexing pinterest, but didn't get anywhere, (this is unsurprising, I was a nobody there.) I have no insight into why they don't de-index pinterest, but I know pinterest was on the radar as a thing of some sort. Meantime, I just add "-site:pinterest.*" to image queries... which I gather is probably more or less the sort of thing this addon does.
You don't have to answer this if you don't feel like it, but I always wondered if "-site:food.bar" is a search signal against that web site when Google ranks domains.
It's sad, because Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers. I was glad when Quora started to outcompete Yahoo Answers, but now Quora is full of long opinionated diatribes. It's been totally useless to me for the last 3 years.
>Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers
I think that's what they call "damning with faint praise"
Indeed. I did a ctrl-f on the comments to see if someone had mentioned Pinterest already. Basically everyone I know who uses the internet consciously (as opposed to say people like my parents who "click the e on the desktop") would install this if this only came with this one website it blocks, period. And as others wrote not only in an image search, but for all searches. As soon as you search for something that can be vaguely expressed visually (home renovation, clothing, layout, ...) pinterest will somehow force its way into the results.
How could they realistically lose money?
The idea behind pinterest is that unsuspecting users grant it legal immunity and full worldwide free distribution rights on everything that they "upload".
So basically, it's a convenience plugin for copyright infringement. Add some ads to other people's content and you're making money.
Just tried this, and on the first page 2 are non-pinterest, and 7 pinterest of various tld. This pollution makes me hate pinterest with a passion.
w3schools.com used to be crap but recently it just gives you what you need to know right away with a couple of examples without delving into the epistemology of what each object, unlike mdn, w3c and the like. It's the next best thing after stackoverflow when it comes to getting the most likely answers quickly.
W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.
> W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.
Even in that case W3schools is mostly good for getting in the way of the much more useful MDN link that should be the top result.
I agree in theory, they improved and surely the result of improvement should be a stopping of the punishment, but I still can't make myself click the links.
Anyway when I know exactly the method I want I just add mdn to the search to make it come up. Especially because if it is a specific method I probably want a deep dive, not just some examples.
The lack of information in w3s can cause confusion. I had a recent example when looking for an interaction in CSS that seemed completely bonkers to me that was immediately explained in the first paragraph of MDN. I decided to look up how it was documented on w3s (disclaimer: I hate it) and they never even mention it.
Sorry for it not being a concrete example, it was last week and I don't have access to my machine atm.
For me, "delving into epistemology" is critical. A straight-up answer, no explanation given, is next to worthless, as I have nothing to evaluate the correctness, completeness, and usefulness of the answer.
It's also host to a pretty useful experiment page to try things out yourself. It's great for whipping up small scale prototypes with.
my least favorites are the generic "difference between" sites, none of whose domains I can remember at the moment. but they really drive me nuts when I want to find results from people who actually know what they're talking about.
Yes, the ones that say the difference between React and Angular is React has 4,000 GitHub stars. There is a world where "there's no relevant article" is a better answer than... these results.
Precisely due to the existence of these two websites, Quora and cplusplus.com I have a custom Google search engine using a whitelist I created specifically to exclude these and include bloggers from standards committees and other people I follow
A tool that does that on Reddit would be useful too. I don't need commondreams and theroot opinion articles...
commondreams? Are you by chance browsing /r/politics? I find the most useful way to browse /r/politics is to sort by controversial because it pierces the bubble.
/r/politics is just the left version of /r/the_donald, and they're both insufferable.
I miss the niche subs with quality discussion and content, but the rest of Reddit just started overflowing there too and ruined it.
I do not regret deleting my account. Although whenever a web search returns a Reddit link, I don't have RES and old.* redirect to make the site usable any more. Don't know how anyone uses new Reddit.
You're better off just installing something like Boost or Baconreader on your phone to take care of Reddit links from searches. I haven't touched Reddit on a desktop system in over a year because it's just easier to use an app and not have to deal with the ridiculously awful redesign or fiddle with RES.
There are still some useful niche communities. r/bonsai is still about bonsai and relatively meme free. r/amateurradio is ok too
If you're searching just the one site then the site: prefix (e.g. site:reddit.com, site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>) works a treat.
Yes, That's the one! You create a set of rules and you can publicly publish your url. I have one specifically for programming related searches and one for news.
You can have URL patterns for example: en.cppreference.com/<asterisk>
Edit: I wasn't able to get the star to work in the post
Somewhat, but it's more about explanations and implementations of common algorithms that appear in interviews etc. Unfortunately, everything outside the algorithms is very low-effort SEO content. I'd be happy excluding it from my search results and only go there when I need to look up a specific algorithm.
Don't forget Stackshare. One of the most disgusting tech spam websites of all time.
I don't think you ever stop learning C++... :)
But I trust cppreference more for the details, which are often necessary for C++ because, well, the devil's in the details. (And to be totally honest, the styling is just nicer.)
Compare the docs for std::vector for example, cplusplus[0] and cppreference[1]. The former spends three paragraphs explaining the internals, whereas the latter only spends one. The latter also includes information about what's been introduced on which language version (11, 17, 20) and assorted facts that the former doesn't discuss, e.g. the various container contracts that vector fulfills.
[0] http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/vector/vector/
[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector
I also used cplusplus.com a lot when learning, and (as far as I can tell) it's basically fine, but cppreference.com has been my go-to for quite a while now. The latter is subjectively more complete/precise/helpful to me (and it's just as a good a reference for C, which is actually what I mostly use it for).
I'm curious what saagarjha's experience is, too.
cplusplus.com just has worse information; it annoys me because it outranks cppreference.com and I have never been the the former and said "gee, I'm glad I came here because it had better details".
Nothing, it's a fine reference. But I could see people wanting to skip it in the top results.
And pinterest, expertsexchange and a bunch of others. Right now I blackhole them in the DNS, being able to strip them out of serps is a great idea, it puts the lie to Google serving you what you want though.
I'm really surprised to see Mayo Clinic on here. It's one of the few trustworthy sources of medical info on the internet.
In my experience, Mayo Clinic and several other similar sites are ranked far too highly by Google for the paltry information they offer. I can somewhat understand why Google has chosen to deliberately suppress more information-rich sources like Wikipedia specifically for medical queries, but I find it to be extremely annoying. When I search for information about a disease online, I'm usually not trying to use Google as a substitute for asking my doctor, and I don't appreciate Google trying to funnel me to sites that are dumbed down. My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.
> My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.
OK, I see the problem, and I'm not sure how Google can solve it. The problem is that you are unlike the vast majority of other Google users. Most of the time someone is searching for an illness, it's because they think they (or someone they know) has it. Mayo Clinic is great for that.
I personally sometimes search for more detail, but then I usually go directly to Wikipedia (which has as much info as a layperson like me can understand, but much more than Mayo Clinic).
I can't wait until I get home and try this. I am completely sick to death of Google image search results being full of videos. It's impossible to find an actual gif to imbed in an HTML comment post because the results are drowning in videos from Giphy, Tenor, etc. It'll be so delicious to consign them to oblivion.
Edit: unfortunately it doesn't work on image search. Oh well.
Thank you so much for this. Was looking for something similar, found only solutions that were dependent on extensions I didn't want to install due to privacy/security reasons.
Thanks. Same here and I tried to keep it as vanilla as possible. Let me know if and I can improve it (either here or using Github issues).
Can we have the option of not showing the removed results? Or maybe just show small notification on top "some results were removed by Wiper, click here to show them"?
Otherwise some search results might still be plagued with offenders, though admittingly their presence is much more sufferable.
Apparently some people prefer the fact that the results are not fully removed. I have a better idea- to let the users decide it, so for v.1.0 I'm going to take these two ideas into account: 1. CSS-ify to suppress the results, 2. Remove them fully.
Firstly, thank you for building this I have exactly the same itch and I'm so glad someone provided a way to scratch it.
> The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
Could you explain a little more about how the stripping of the 'blacklist' works.
OK, I suppose I could be slightly less lazy and read the source, which shows that you're iterating through the blacklist then iterating through the results page and removing elements that match. There are some default offenders blacklisted automatically by the look of it, nice and simple.
And I just recently looked for something like this because I'm sick and tired of Google top-ranking results from Reddit, where someone asked an intelligent question, and there were zero responses. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an actually-useful response to a technical question on Reddit, but a link to a targeted subreddit always seems to be at the top of my search results now. I wonder how much this is costing Reddit. I hope it's a lot, and they stop this nonsense soon.
You sure that, reddit buys its place?
I rather suspect this has to do with the search algorithm favors known and big domains in the ever going on war against scam and fake sites.
I too have noticed the big 3 search engines serving more *eddit links than usual. And without retyping the url, (old.) the comments are hidden anyway so they are effectively a shade worse than useless.
You can add: To your query to exclude all results from example.com
Then, you can configure your search bar to automatically add those terms to your query.
But that way you'd be avoiding the results completely(even in the unlikely event that they could be potentially helpful)
Amazing! Thanks!
We need this for YouTube as well, though the blacklist would be extremely large.
In fact, I wonder if this could be implemented as a filter list for uBlock Origin?
When I log out, YouTube becomes total trash, so I thought the algorithm was really customized to me. Then I visited a friend to watch some movies and saw half our recommendations were identical. Like we got placed in the same "bucket" or something.
I remember reading something that said is how spotify makes discover weekly playlists (but I can't find it now), so I wouldn't be too surprised
Which domains would you recommend adding to the blacklist for a HN crowd? It would be nice if this had some presets builtin.
Wonderful idea. I find google to be marginally useful. Mostly though it returns a barrage of low quality results like mentioned here in the comments, that might be related but you really don't ever want to see. Obvious though it'll never be allowed on chrome's web store.
This used to be built-in to google itself. You could choose to block a site from future results from any results page. But they killed it, along with forum search, code search, usenet search, and so many other useful things.
Yes, my first thought upon reading the post was "doesn't Google already offer this?" Didn't realise they'd killed it.
I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine these days and I'm actually reasonably happy with it. The results used to be laughably bad but they've really improved lately.
Sadly, the one thing where DDG is usually crap is for anything code-related, especially if I'm searching for something very specific like an error message or an obscure library. That's when I have to jump back to Google (well, actually Startpage.)
Regarding DDG, I have noticed that recently it has started to suggest a ton of porn, even for totally unrelated searches.
As an experiment I just typed in the first thing that came to my mind: "thorn in cat's paw". One of the results is "Cat porn videos", on the very first page! And this is far from the worst case I've encountered...
Glad this has been brought up. I noticed it a while ago and wanted to post it here every time someone falsely repeats how great DDG is, but couldn't recall any of the searches.
With safe search moderate, which is default in private windows, I don't think I should be getting hardcore porn results even if I'm searching for hardcore porn terms.
Aside from that, 99% (or maybe all) of my searches are "not many sites contain what you want to see, so here's a ton of other shit to wade through", necessitating another tedious, furious click to get what I asked for.
Not many results contain covid? Okay. The only reason to DDG is to add !g or !s or even !b to every search.
Did you turn off safe search? I don't get porn with these search terms. Unless I turn off the porn filter.
As I do not know, what DDG subsumes under "objectionable material" (apart from it being "mostly adult"), yes. It was never a problem until recently, some sites seem to have stepped up their SEO game.
DDG just recommends the british TV series 'Thorne' after I disable the safe search ...?
AS I said in a post above, I've been using TamperMonkey[1] and a userscript[2] to do this. Reading the [virtually non-existent] description of the uBlacklist plugin, it seems to offer the same thing. Now I'm wondering if there's any reason to prefer an extension over a userscript [or vice versa]?
[1] https://www.tampermonkey.net/ [2] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
ASIDE: whatever the merits of this particular extension, I think the choice of name is a pretty snidey attempt by the developer to cash in on the popularity of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
uBlacklist can also filter results on Duck Duck Go and Startpage (it's in settings if you go to chrome://extensions/ find uBlacklist, click on it, scroll to the bottom and click "Extension options"), but I've never tried it.
Confirmed working on DDG (text search only) and Startpage (both text and images), tested on Firefox.
This is a great idea! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it beforehand! I looked through your code and it looks like you replace the HTML of the page. Have you considered appending "-site:<blacklisted url> -site:<blacklisted url>...etc" to the end of the search query instead? This way, the user still gets a full page of relevant search results.
I'm not sure how flexible extensions are, but maybe you could intercept all request attempts to google search, append the blacklisted URLs to the search query, then hide them on the loaded page so that the user doesn't have to see the long list of appended, blacklisted URLs.
Thanks. No that has the potential issue of assuming that results from your blacklist are complete crap. That'd be equivalent of removing the search results based on the blacklist entirely (right?). Based on a comment here on HN as well, I think that's not necessarily a good idea. You don't know what you don't know, so may be a blacklisted website may return a valid result (unlikely but probable, so I'm letting that assumption be there).
And feel free to contribute on Github if you like :)
It removes all blacklisted URLs from the search results. Isn't that what your extension does?
Ah, so it's actually not entirely removing blacklisted results, it's just condensing those results. Personally, I think I'd be more interested in nabakin's idea of editing the query before it gets sent to Google.
Although - like zargon says in a top-level comment - this clearly should just be built into search engines themselves. The only semi-legitimate reason I can think of that they wouldn't be is that results for a given query would be even less reproducible than they already are from person-to-person. But since Google already "personalizes" results, I don't think that's really a factor for them. They could just have a little button at the bottom that says "3 results from sites you've blacklisted - wanna see them?" or whatever.
Since the results are customized anyway, they should also give us a way to assign more or less weight to a result and learn from that for future search queries.
Google News does this on every link (Hide stories from XXX, More stories like this, Fewer stories like this) so clearly the feature exists.
I am thinking about more customization, especially this that allows the user to 1. suppress (like now) or 2. remove the results entirely. But in my defence, it was a weekend project for a noob like me.
Agreed, that'd be excellent. It's too bad that it doesn't really seem like Google's MO to give us those kinds of levers in Search.
> "-site:<blacklisted url> -site:<blacklisted url>...etc"
I actually have a keyworded URL in my Firefox bookmarks for that, IIRC there is a limit (a very low one if you really want to get rid of all the spam options) for how many sites you can block this way
Honestly, at this point Google themselves should be offering this.
Not only would it keep people coming back for actually valuable results, but it would feed them with an up-to-the minute listing of sites people don't trust.
Even better, let people subscribe to block lists, like ad blockers do. Instead of putting together my own list of shit sites (which will be perpetually out of date), I'd be happy to outsource that to some group I trust.
It's an enhancement issue I've already added to the repository on Github. Planning to roll it out in the next update :) Honestly, I didn't know how big of a pain it was to a lot of people until now.
!! I've used Google since the early early days, and either I missed that entirely, or tried it once and didn't actually need it until recently.
+10 points for bringing the facts.
As someone who just graduated college and found geeksforgeeks, cplusplusreference, and w3schools quite helpful for Algorithms, c++ Syntax, and learning some basic web design stuff (respectively).....what should I be using? I see a lot of people hating on them....but they all seemed alright to me. Is it just because they are too basic? (I used a lot of these things for just learning basic things I either forgot the syntax for or needed a quick introduction).
I'd especially like to know for c++.
The complaints about these sites is usually that (a) they're literally wrong just often enough that you don't want to rely on them, which defeats the point of a reference, or (b) they try to "teach" things that are not recommended best practices. With w3schools in particular, there's the added "ick" that they try very hard to make it look like they're an offical W3C source, and sell scammy certifications based on that confusion. They also provided (past tense, because I haven't looked at it in years) some very questionable practices with PHP that would lead to trivially insecure code.
cppreference.com is what I usually use for C++. It's well organized, well cross-linked, and uses exact standards language whenever possible. It's also very good about showing the differences between successive versions of the C++ standard libraries, which is invaluable if you're working with any sort of legacy code and wondering why something looks funny.
For HTML5/JS, MDN (Mozilla) was my default when I did front-end, but it's been a little while. I'm sure Mozilla is still great, but there might also be something easier to traverse.
Ahhhh.....you know what, now that I think about it, I remember last semester for a class I had to do a bunch of PHP + SQL for a Backend (my first time really using either). I basically just googled a bunch of stuff and I ended up just writing the queries in as strings basically because that's what I saw on a site (very possibly one of the ones in question).
I felt it was wrong because I was concerned about SQL injection, but my professor really didn't care about security so I wasn't too too concerned. Later on my professor mentioned that pre-compiled statements (I think that's what they are called) and I facepalmed because that would have been way more secure and been 5x easier anyways.
So yea, I guess they still are giving bad advice.
The're basic but that's not the real problem. Plenty of articles are basic but also offer unique perspective or insight. The real problem is that these articles are often uninspired and seemingly only written for the purpose of writing an article. Full of keywords to maximize google search potential. And then your technical search gets bogged down by these SEO friendly articles and you can't find what you need.
Its a lot worse for python than, say, kotlin. That was one of the biggest things I noticed when changing languages recently.
If I installed this extension, cplusplus.com would be the very first thing to go on my blacklist. I always want cppreference.com.
This should already have been part of Google itself. Some sites come up high far too frequently for certain searches of mine, and it's never the best info.
I like that this doesn't completely blow away the result, but I do kind of wish is was further de-emphasized. Maybe smaller font or faded text.
Yes, it was a part of Google search. I guess they removed it because not many people were using it. Too bad I was a big fan of this feature.
I'm pretty sure it use to be, I remember searching for something like this years ago and stumbling upon a comment saying it had recently stopped that offering.
The two issues I have with Google search recent: first, I often get results, when searching for something technical which look like they have huge potential, a sentence with my search terms in, amongst a technical looking paragraph, with a URL, at first glance, that looks good, I click on it and it attempts to take over the browser with spam, redirects etc, I then realize the domain had random characters before the end, but I wonder how such terrible results end up on Google. I want to ban these sites from my searches. Secondly, unrelated to this extension, recently, Google have started popping up a box with other search terms I may be interested in, just after the search loads, within the search results, and the amount of times I have gone to click, only to be last minute intercepted by a link in this box which suddenly appears is unreal. Anyone else get that?
To your second point, yes, all the time and it's infuriating. You either need to slow down how you use the search results page, or they appear from nowhere just as you're trying to click the second link.
What's worse is I then berate myself mentally as I know that Google has some metric on how many times these suggestions get clicked, and there's some product owner somewhere saying "wow!, x% of users use these suggestions, let's keep this feature!"
Never experienced the latter; but couldn't agree more on the first issue. Actually if you'd not articulated it I'd have thought it was only me. These (farm?) have super awesome titles and content description but then takes to (ph|f)ishy pages. Usually happens to me when I search "[Ebook Title] download". Interestingly of the late I don't see a lot of them after coming to Europe (and see Google mentioning some GDPR compliance related omissions).
This might be useful to blacklist some of the shopping results when you want facts and not shopping results. Sometimes I google "how does X work" type questions, and I get pages of links of things I should buy. The top stuff are obvious ads, but the non-ad results are basically shopping sites, too. That's mean of Google. They're our main source of information ("How does X work") and instead they want to redirect you to shopping because .. they can.
I notice -shopping helps... magically. But not enough.
Maybe the blacklist is the right idea. Can there be a magic incantation to exclude or include groups of blacklisted sites on a whim?
Great work! I actually made something similar 15 years ago with a P2P social networking angle: You could hide/promote results based on your friends' reccomendations.
Check out some old screenshots from Firefox version 1.0: http://getoutfoxed.com/screenshots
It went viral on del.icio.us and let to me taking venture funding to found www.lijit.com, which lives on now as http://sovrn.com/
This is very inspirational! Actually I have something similar in mind- 1. to allow subscribing to friend's or network's lists. and/or 2. Make it a 'window' to your search experience. So it's privacy focused personal/social logic that offers you Google or any search engine that way you prefer. I think PageRank is not enough (or may be too much) for me...
This is a really cool idea. I wish something like that would exist as a Pinboard Extension. Where it just decorates your search results with information about if your friends have it bookmarked, your tags or even blacklist domains if tagged as blacklist:domain or something on Pinboard by you or your friends. Would be a nice way to make use of that data.
Good bye corporate news from my search results! I am so fed up with a bunch of news articles always crowding out the top results for nearly every search query. No more having to wade though propaganda soup to find the things i want.
This extension comes at a good time. Just a couple of weeks ago I was wondering how search would feel if you'd remove all news sites (mainstream and otherwise).
I would so love to have a search engine setting in which I could remove the top 500 web properties from my search, or have similar parameters to help remove large swaths information that I'm not interested in looking at.
We really should bring back OpenSearch which is/was a way for sites to expose a search URL to browsers (like RSS URLs). You'd then directly query those sites rather than going to the middleman (Google or other search engines). Only that sites exposing OpenSearch URLs probably aren't prepared to be queried by meta crawlers and huge query loads will bring them down rather quickly I guess. The quality of search results on both Google and alternatives is shockingly poor; I can't find documents I used to find only three years ago. I, too, wonder if Google has just lost interest in fighting SEO spam. But I find it hard to believe that they aren't all over their cash cow so I have to conclude they send you to the sites with the most AdWords and Google analytics crap on purpose. At which point Google's search results can be used as a pretty good negative filter I guess ;) Interesting times ahead for search engines.
Thank you! I was searching for an add-on like this a few months ago. When I search for tech support issues I get a lot of SEO spam blogs that have no useful information now I can finally filter them out.
Please make one for Bing. I gave up on Google search about half a year ago initially for all searches that could yield politically incorrect results, but then for all technical searches as well due to these spammy sites. Bing technical search is definitely higher quality and the general results are more politically neutral, but it still needs your extension. I currently find Firefox/Bing to be the most effective combination.
I never personally used Bing much (but memes have told me the same about its search quality). I will take into consideration for the next execution.
I have been also mildly pissed at Youtube results and given how permeated it is into a 'learner's' life, I have been thinking about Youtube too. But in that case I'll have to take more usability into account to allow for right-click>add_to_blacklist kind of thing since there are so many low-quality ad-loaded channels.
I think Bing is better than Google when it comes to NSFW stuff (friend told me) and probably Image Search
I'll second this experience. Bing news has become markedly more curated recently, imo. But it's still miles ahead of Google with respect to treating you like an adult capable of critically engaging with information.
It seems kinda ridiculous that such a obvious and extremely useful idea hadn't been made yet, I cant wait to use it!
Bravo! Thanks so much or developing this.
Any reason you chose to do this as a Firefox plugin rather than a Greasemonkey (or similar) script? Not judging, just wondering.
1. My hatred for Chrome (kind of recent HN influence) led me into Firefox first and foremost hence Firefox. Even though I'll be porting it to Chrom(ium-e) soon. 2. It could be my attitude but I thought writing ground up vanilla would be much easier than learning a new tool, i.e., I know Greasemonkey only as much as in its name and nothing else about its workflow. 2.1 I guess an addon is easier to distribute/install (?).
This does look interesting, but it requires much more permissions and personally I hesitate to grant those for any non-monitored extension.
you might as well preload this with Pinterest, that is precisely what I and most people will be using this ext for
I got sick of seeing links to sites I knew I never wanted to visit (or couldn't due to pay/sign-up walls) and accidentally clicking them, so I made something similar to this for myself, but it applies to all sites.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/
[1] https://github.com/7w0/ssure
It's terrible to configure because it was only intended for personal use. The only reason it's in the add-on repository at all is the annoying fact you can't reasonably use a locally installed add-on.
i use search keywords for everything, but i have the following custom keyword for google image search (this is firefox, though i believe it works for chrome too if you create one and manually edit it):
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=-pinterest.com...
it strips out all results from pinterest and youtube thumbnails. though with the lack of direct image links i've been leaning more on ddg and bing these days.
Coincidentally, I have been working on a similar Chrome/Opera extension.
It works for Google, Yahoo!, Bing, DuckDuckGo and a few others, but I haven't finished it or packaged it up to submit to Google yet. Some rough edges and lots of TODOs still.
Anyway, it's here if anyone is interested in the code or would like to collaborate: https://github.com/daverayment/SearchHide
Thank you! Just curious, is there any reason why "Wiper blacklisted URL: <URL>" need to be shown instead of a cleaner removal?
You mean why not fully remove the URL? That's just in the odd case you really do want to visit the link (after Google think that it's a good result). May be example.com happens to be the ONLY website that does have some good content, I personally wouldn't want to ban it entirely. But in every case, I'd like to strip their results so I won't have to scroll down to get to the good results.
First thing that came to my mind, is this the next-gen ad blocking?
Interesting project and I think I am on board with it. Google search results have declined a lot in the last 2 years, mostly because of oversaturation by brands that have been playing the SEO game for years.
It's getting increasingly harder to land on pages that have been written by someone without a strict interest in search engine traffic.
I wonder is there extension that would do exactly opposite, only include google results from sites that i choose in order that i want.
Ordering is something that I'm not sure about (but I've myself been thinking about it for a future addon- if not the current one) that would 'weigh' the URLs like .edu/wikipedia etc. much higher. Would such a feature be helpful to you? And as a part of the same addon?
As for only results from specific websites, you may use Google Operators (like inurl, site, etc.)
Yeah, I'm looking for something like this too. I would like to have Wikipedia at the top of the results.
Well doesn't give order, but "cake site:news.ycombinator.com" will give search for keyword "cake" only on HN.
At one point google had this as a chrome extension and as a built in feature to the search itself. Both are now dead for some reason
I like the idea, although I personally won't be using it, I really like that it exists.
From a "freedom" perspective, I think individuals are free to impose their own filters but generally the default should be unrestricted access. That would possibly be with the caveat of the provably vulnerable (children, mental disabilities, etc).
Keep up the good work!
for those who dont know about native search filters, appending "-domain.tld" to a regular search query also works
"-domain.tld" has the side-effect that it'd not get any results from those domains then; which might not be a good idea (at least in 1% of those cases when say "-domain.tld" might be what exactly you're looking for".
This is absolutely fantastic. Similarly frustrated with sites gaming SEO with near rubbish results or bare minimum content.
I created an add-on which replaces !s with inurl:stackoverflow.com to replicate the bangs of duckduckgo in Google.
How come not site:stackoverflow.com? Is this just a different way of doing the same thing? I've never heard of the inurl: flag
inurl filters so that the result URLs must contain the keyword specified. So inurl:w3 would only show results where w3 is in the URL. It works for this use case but it's better to just use site like you mentioned.
You can't even fully rely on those operatorsike site: anymore because Google now happily serves you results from miscreants that tag their scam site urls with valid site names, so instead of getting results from only let's say mozilla.org, you also now get them from their scamsite because they appended the actual mozilla site url into their own.
Are you sure that happens with site and not inurl? That's a big bug. Do you have an example?
Me too. It's been great
I've also cobbled together a Tampermonkey script which I wittily call "HackerChoose" which allows me to similarly block domains from appearing on HN. Unfortunately my JS-foo isn't up to making it interactive, so I have to manually update the list of banned domains. But, if anyone's interested, here it is:
This actual Tampermonkey stub script imports the full userscript from a location elsewhere on my hard drive. This makes it easier to maintain the list of banned domains by editing that imported file directly, rather than having to make edits from within Tampermonkey's clunky interface:
https://pastebin.com/raMSWMDi
This is the imported userscript. I pretty much lifted it from one someone else had made and then twiddled it a bit. So apologies to whoever the original author was, but I've forgotten where I got it, so can't give you the credit:
https://pastebin.com/SbtfXEby
I don't believe you can accomplish precisely what this does with uBO. You can blacklist your browser itself from connecting to certain domains with uBO but you can't fully remove them from within a google search results page since the google results page isn't explicitly connecting to the domains, just displaying links to do so.
Even with some advanced cosmetic rules the most you could do is remove the <a> tag fields, not the full title/text of the results.
If you can select the <a> tag, then you can likely use a procedural cosmetic filter to go up the DOM like with :upward(n). So this should be possible.
Google search sucks so hard these days. Absurdly shitty.
Needs to be unfucked via antitrust IMO they have lost their way.
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if a legitimate competitor emerged? It's not like antitrust legislation significantly raised the quality of Microsoft's software in the 90s.
Sorry to hijack this thread but does anyone know of any extension that blocks / strips certain kinds of content.
Use case: I am as guilty of mindless browsing as the next person but seeing news / click-bait headlines about certain celebs like the kardashians makes my blood boil.
uBlock Origin has custom filters you can use. I'm guilty of the exact same thing (just not the same sites). Here's a sample of what I use: The first blocks YT entirely. The second blocks URL loads (if you load the URL directly) AND SPA redirects. I mostly use these to use YT only for content I subscribe to and avoid the algorithms by impulse or accident. Note that not all SPAs work the same, so you'd have to do some digging. For example, 9Gag doesn't redirect from the same API endpoint but instead uses payload data, so it's more difficult to block that. You can still block direct pageloads, but not SPA redirects, so for sites like that you may want to just block the entire domain.
I have a small list of content I try to avoid using this, mostly Reddit subs and "main" pages like r/all or r/popular. With this in mind, my ideal YT & reddit feeds are only content I explicitly want to see.
Else, I'd recommend a feed curator like Feedly. You can set up custom site feeds and so you'll only see those. I started using it after Firefox killed its RSS. This way there's no algorithm except popularity of a given link from a feed, not what is on the feed at all. So the onus of balance is still on you, but way easier.
If I may be frank it sounds like a deeper problem than browsing certain sites. May want to work on impulse control and contemplate why you are driven to these sites in the first place.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't get what this is doing. How did the Google search results get inside some other URL?
I tried to watch the animation to understand, but it's too low resolution for me to read.
It basically lets you create a list of blacklisted URLs and then any Google search results that matches against these URLs is stripped to the bare URL alone. The screenshot on the Firefox Addons page is of a much better quality.
I love this! Semi-related, I was just fiddling with a Firefox extension this morning to flip Python 2 documentation results with those of Python 3 (usually also in the results, but lower on the page)
Sorry to be a pedant here, but I think a title of "Show HN: A Firefox add-on to strip Google search results _of_ 'blacklisted' URLs" is much more clear.
Don't think I've ever wanted to install an extension so fast. There are so, so many domains that I am content to literally never see in search results...
Blocking Pinterest results in image search was my first thought with this extension. That's disappointing if it doesn't, will test myself now.
Google has a similar built-in feature today, just add "-" before the domain you don't want to see. For example:
html a tag -w3schools.com
So basically block 70% of all results from first and second page? Google has turned into a defective product.
answers.microsoft.com
I'd blacklist that. Rarely if ever has an actual answer to the question asked in my experience and for some reason comments seem to get duplicated.
I'm not aware about other similar tools. But I'll be soon porting and submitting on Chrome as well.
So far, goodbye:
pinterest.com
forbes.com
amazon.co.uk
amazon.com
pinterest.co.uk
ebay.com.au
ebay.ca
pinterest.at
ebay.fr
pickclick.co.uk
pickclick.fr
etsy.com