Use duckduckgo.com. Its pretty good with excluding spam. And with a new service there is an indicator of how spammy a site is.
Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
181–190 of 217 posts
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#182Also, I would like '[any widget] review' to take me to an actual review, not pages upon pages of spam. I usually end up looking at comments on a few trusted sites (e.g. Amazon). This seems broken...
Yes, most of the results for this query wind up pointing to pages saying "be the first to review [any widget]". As a workaround, try searching for "[any widget] sucks" and "[any widget] good". EDIT: tying this to other discussions on the topic, it's a symptom of Patio11's observation that natural language search doesn't work very well. If you want to find something, you need to paint a picture of what it looks like,…
automated version of this: http://www.sucks-rocks.com/
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#183blekko . com is doing this and much more
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#184I 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…
It should be pretty easy to set up public block lists. The ones that are honest about their methodology (of which sites are spammy) would win.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#185"This would solve a lot of people's complaints in one fell swoop." And doing this would spawn a lot of people's complaints in one fell swoop. If you owned a site, and created enemies, they could band together and flag your site as spam.
I don't think you understood his suggestion. "Banning" a site would be local to your signed-in google account, not a global ban from results (which would indeed suffer the backfire you mentioned.)
doh!
You are totally correct. I completely missed that. Maybe I should drink a bit of coffee and wake up ;)
Although... I have a suspicion that at some point it would effect non-logged in users. Many logged in users banning a site is a signal that may effect the global results. Maybe in the same way marking spam in Gmail...
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#186In the old days we had killfile. Why can't we PLONK content sources like authors or sites by handles like nicks or domain names? There should be some standard protocol for that. Httplonk.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#187"This would solve a lot of people's complaints in one fell swoop." And doing this would spawn a lot of people's complaints in one fell swoop. If you owned a site, and created enemies, they could band together and flag your site as spam.
Now they can bot-click your adsense ads to cause google to ban you. If you are ad sponsored this effectively puts you out of business.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#188Google 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. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/
Agree with the sibling poster - this is the best comment in the thread. Do you have any interest in sharing your hard work with us?
If you go to the CSE website and select 'Advanced' and then download annotations, you can export the list of sites you've excluded.
Further you can make the exclusion list ("annotation list") into a feed - so it is entirely possible to implement the kind of user-generated blacklist of sites which has been discussed here.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#189I'm not sure how this would be implemented. Where would the blacklist be held and how would it influence the search results? I know that they already do a lot of search customization but most of it is just aggregate statistical computations. It's not that they return results specifically tailored to you but more like results tailored to a very fuzzy average version of you. A blacklist seems way too specific to each u…
That's the point, what I want is exactly a user-specific blacklist. I can even do that already with Google's Custom Search, all that's missing is a little 'block this site' button. Instead I have to go and configure Custom Search manually for each URL mask.
You could write a little GreaseMonkey script or extension to do that, shouldn't be too hard.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Yes, but that would be pretty evil of them, don't you think? ;)