Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches.
Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
151–160 of 217 posts
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#152I see a lot of people asking what happens when a group of people downvote a site just to ruin its ranking. Sure that's a problem, but there's an easy solution on Google's end: your blacklist only affects you. Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me... Plus, we are talking about a company whose core business demands that it can identify groups of bad-faith voters. G…
The blacklist does not only have to affect me, just throw in the blacklists of my social graph too. These are the people I trust.
I don't know about you, but my social graph is pretty diverse. I wouldn't trust all those very different people to make an important decision like "what sites should be visible to me in search engines."
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#153No, it's not particular hard, but it will make the problem worse. Why? 99% of users are non-tech oriented. Those users will not really be aware of the specific problems with the search results, they won't understand the concept of a good vs bad result and they certainly won't bother to tweak/ban/filter their results. The 1% that do care and are currently being vocal about it will start filtering their results and the…
Google already has reading level data per domain (append &tbs=rl:1 to any site search)
Why not apply that reading level algorithm to users gmail data and public social network profiles, estimate the users IQ, and then those at the top of the pile are given "result burrying" moderator privileges.
Confirmed user accounts (cell phone verification) combined with other algorithms, such as profile age and activity, could make spamming sufficiently complex to de-incenvize all but the most illicit spammers.
Users at the bottom of the IQ pile (non-logged in users based on past search data and geo-location socio-economic status) don't even get the option to bury results. Which, by the way I think is more like 20% of US internet users than 99%.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#154Just use Google SearchWiki.
Oh, yeah – they pulled it.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#155I see a lot of people asking what happens when a group of people downvote a site just to ruin its ranking. Sure that's a problem, but there's an easy solution on Google's end: your blacklist only affects you. Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me... Plus, we are talking about a company whose core business demands that it can identify groups of bad-faith voters. G…
The blacklist does not only have to affect me, just throw in the blacklists of my social graph too. These are the people I trust.
Which brings up another point: I think that if anything is going to threaten Google in the coming years, it'll be the quality of their social graph. Gmail gives them a lot of data, but if my inbox is any indication a lot of it is somewhat ambiguous. Aside from that their social apps haven't done too well (in most places).
Facebook, on the other hand, has developed a system where nearly every user activity creates a new easily processed and meaningful connection between users or out to the web itself. And those connections are probably closer to representations of some kind of trust than "I email that person a lot".
Anyway, I'm not saying the sky is falling for Google, just that search appears to be changing for the first time in awhile.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#156It seems like a obvious answer, but why not just use "-site:annoyingpage.com" in you search? In fact "-TotallyUnRelated" has helped me narrow down searches effectively too. You are asking for a feature that only a small subset of the users will benefit from and use, it makes more sense for google just to find a way to rank sites better then it does to build a additional filter on top of the current system.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The blacklist does not only have to affect me, just throw in the blacklists of my social graph too. These are the people I trust.
I don't know about you, but my social graph is pretty diverse. I wouldn't trust all those very different people to make an important decision like "what sites should be visible to me in search engines."
You're right. Others should not be able to hide sites from my search results, but their decision on blacklisting sites can affect the ranking of sites in my search results.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#158I'd definitely make use of this feature. Some ancillary features might include:
a) Google could warn you if it thinks the sites you have blacklisted seemed to have regained credibility.
b) Google could suggest additional sites you may wish to blacklist, based on other user blacklists.
c) Google could allow outside parties to curate blacklists.
d) Google could list the most commonly black-listed sites publicly. For the webmasters that find themselves listed who want to run an actual honest business, this is a good sign they should change their tactics. For the folks that aim to spam and profit... well screw those guys.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is experts-exchange really a spam site? I always thought they had real users who ask&answer questions. But that they are just a crap site that hides this behind a paywall (I'm aware that the actual content is at the bottom of the page).
That sounds like trying to excuse junkmail and spam because someone out there finds it useful and orders the products being offered.
I'm not trying to do that. I'm just arguing that classifying it as spam is not fair. I remember (before SO) finding some useful info there from time to time. Whereas junk mail trying to sell me a bride from Russia for 50€ is defenetily a hoax :)
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches. For example, for a low competition keyword, 1 link can make a big difference to a site's rankings. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. It's the same algorithm affecting the rankings in both cases, just in the latter case there's a lot more data being used as input. That's the way…
Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches They haven't been doing a good job lately. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. Not that many, and do you think that's a problem? Search "viagra": http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra This is the third result (after wikipedia + viagra.com which have a hardcoded boost): http://www.…
Google's link operator is not reliable - it intentionally hides links to confuse SEOs. Take a site you own, for example, and compare the number of links that webmaster tools shows for it with the number of links that Google's link operator shows for it.
That site you point to has many more links than Google shows. You can check yahoo to get a more realistic count:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.genericvia...
But even that is probably only indexing a small fraction of the links that are likely to be pointing to that site. Generally when a site has a few thousand spammy links, they've usually got tens of thousands more that haven't been indexed.
Now I'm not for a second saying that that site should be ranking where it is, just because it has a lot of links. I really wish Google did a better job of discounting spammy links.