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Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

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Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#1

Post by sanketpatrikar »

For the unaware, uBlacklist [0] is a browser extension that lets you blacklist sites from the google search results page. It lets you blacklist sites right from the results page, by regex, or by linking lists hosted somewhere.

The low quality of results has been a problem from a while now and has become worse lately thanks to all those StackOverflow and Github clones. So I was wondering if we could come together and contribute to a single blacklist hosted somewhere and then import it into each of our browsers. Who knows? We might end up improving the quality of the results we all get.

Lists to get rid of the StackOverflow and Github clones already exist. [1]

I would love to contribute to a project like this, but won't be able to be a maintainer due to time constraints. Would greatly appreciate it if someone could host this. A simple txt file on github would do.

What do you say, HN?

[0]: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist [1]: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#2

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam?

Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#3

Post by MarcelOlsz »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #2

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

Worst case scenario if Google drops the ball I just go back to the library.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#4

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #2

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

Is there a word for this tendency to say, "it's someone else's job" as a justification for doing nothing at all to help or improve one's own circumstances? I see more and more of it in the public discourse over the last years and it kind of bothers me. I see it a lot in conversations related to poverty or climate change, but it is as we see here by no means exclusive to those topics.

To the original replyer: you could wait for Google to do something, but if they were going to fix the listicle issue, and it were fixable on their end, they'd probably have done it by now. I'm disappointed in the situation too but if there is a workable solution on our end it would be silly to ignore it because fixing the problem is someone else's job.

To the OP: I worry that the number of domains pumping out crap might be far greater than we know, and that might hamper the effectiveness of this. If the collaborative block list ever got big enough you might also have to deal with spam. But I think it would be a great thing to try. This is one of those issues that annoys me, but it's just below my action potential threshold. My biggest objection right now is the spammy recipe websites.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#5

Post by jhchabran »

That's an ambitious goal, I'm not sure to see how that would be maintainable on the long run.

On a much smaller scale, if anyone is interested, I maintain a black list focused on those code snippet content farms that gets in the way when you're searching for some error message or particular function here https://github.com/jhchabran/code-search-blacklist.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#8

Post by ziggus »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #2

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

I think you're wildly overestimating the influence of the minority within HN (or other similar communities) that actually care enough to switch to another search engine.

This reminds me of the Linux gamers who claim that they can influence game development companies by purchasing games with Linux ports, but wind up being less than 0.5% of sales of most games with Linux ports, which leads manufacturers to ignore that customer base almost completely.

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