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Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#171

Post by w1ntermute »

coderdude wrote: post #152
peterhoffmann wrote: post #126

Earlier 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."

Nobody said you had to trust everyone in your social graph. I definitely wouldn't, but that doesn't mean there aren't a few select people that I would trust.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#172

Post by mthoms »

patd wrote: post #107
SimonPStevens wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general yes, I think improved UI can guide user behaviour to more desirable outcomes. However I don't think it's as simple as changing the button text. Even a process driven UI, like a wizard style interface where you have to click next to progress through each step might work, but users very quickly become immune to dialogs. They don't read them, they just evolve the actions that get them to their goal the fastes…

Maybe something more automatic : a user makes a search, clicks on a link, if it is spam, he'll probably hit the back button within a couple of seconds. The average time spent by a user on a result before going back to Google could be used a as metric of quality.

I'd be very surprised if Google does not already implement this in some form.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#173

Post by serveboy »

I use a Chrome extension called Google Search Filter which solves this exact problem - https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/eidhkmnbiahhgbgp...

It lets me sync my config accross multiple machines.

Has nice hacker-ish config. Basically a text file you can share with others. This is my current config:

# Make these domains stand out in results

+en.wikipedia.org

+stackoverflow.com

+github.com

+api.rubyonrails.org

+apple.com

+ruby-doc.org

+codex.wordpress.org

+imdb.com

+alternativeto.net

# SPAM - never show these results

experts-exchange.com

ezinearticles

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#174

Post by prawn »

AndrewO wrote: post #104

I 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…

"Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me..."

efreedom is monetised by Google ads. Might seem like a problem to Google.

Let's say it starts with personal blacklists. Then trusted lists that you can subscribe to (AdBlock-style). Then word spreads and enough people are using it such that AdSense revenue drops 20-30% or more?

(IME, CTR on ads is much higher on these content-light sites than it is on more reputable sites.)

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#175

Post by mthoms »

teach wrote: post #141
twir wrote: post #137

Looks like a lot of people are assuming a solution would some sort of voting system like stackexchange, etc. Why not allow individual users to hide sites from their own search results and save the info in their google account? For example, provide a "hide this site from my results" link next to each result. Each person decides which site they don't want to see and SEO and global results remain unaffected.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Am I the only one that remembers this EXACT feature on Google about a year ago? You had to be logged in to iGoogle, and each search result had a small [X] to the right of it that would appear on hover. If you clicked it, that result wouldn't appear for you again. I used it all the time. Then, lately it's gone. Maybe I was part of a small, randomly-selected test group?

That was part of Google's SearchWiki experiment. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...

That experiment was replaced by Google "Stars" in March 2010 because, according to Google:

> In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn't like changing the order of Google's organic search results.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/stars-make-search-mor...

I personally think there is much more going on here than Google admits.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#176

Post by danudey »

prawn wrote: post #174
AndrewO wrote: post #104

I 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…

"Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me..." efreedom is monetised by Google ads. Might seem like a problem to Google. Let's say it starts with personal blacklists. Then trusted lists that you can subscribe to (AdBlock-style). Then word spreads and enough people are using it such that AdSense revenue drops 20-30% or more? (IME, CTR on ads is much higher on these co…

To be honest, I think this is the reason Google doesn't have this feature. The sites everyone wants to blacklist are the spammers that game Google search and show Google ads. If they don't get traffic, they don't show ads. If they don't show ads, Google doesn't get that money either.

It's to Google's benefit that people end up on these pages, see a ton of ads, and then click on one out of confusion or desperation.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#177

Post by michaelhart »

Google Domain Blocker: (userscript/greasemonkey), for those interested.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156

You can also sync them for Firefox across multiple machines using Dropbox, as the preferences are stored in your profile (IIRC, in a javascript file).

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#178

Post by RP_Joe »

So what we are talking about is censorship. You are suggesting a non-traditional type where a government does not do the censoring, but a few people do. How many votes would it take to put a website on a blacklist? 50, 100?

Who decides if a site is spam?

So is free speech dead under your proposal? What is I build a site that criticizes the Governor of your state. Or a federal agency. What would prevent my site from being blacklisted in your proposal? Even if I had great content (your argument is about poor quality content) my could be voted into a black hole in a few hours. Lets think about this carefully. Is that the price we are willing to pay to get rid of EE?

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#180

Post by moxiemk1 »

jasonkester wrote: post #128
travisp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ExpertsExchange is at least original content (as far as I know)

ExpertsExchange used to be nearly 100% scraped usenet. Then eventually a few poor souls stumbled in thinking it was an actual site and started posting questions there directly. Eventually people even started answering them. Had they not had such a terrible site design and revenue scheme, they might have actually made the transition from scraping bottom feeder to respectable site.

I never knew that. I always assumed that someone out there was paying for all these questions.

Good to know.

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