Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by thinkbohemian » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 5:47 AM UTC

Does anyone remember when google had this feature?

Well sortof, you could block individual responses from coming up under a specific search term.

There was a little x by each result if you were signed into google and it said "never show this result again"

Not enough people used the feature for it to stick around...

I would love this ability but google please, good UI and consumer education. I love your features but don't love when they get taken away because users don't know they exist.

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

#192

Post by pilooch » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 6:19 AM UTC

you can do it with seeks... http://www.seeks-project.info/ http://www.seeks.fr/

on your local machine and/or remote server... and it's free software.

blekko ? try this query, http://blekko.com/ws/?q=debian duh ?

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

#193

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 6:51 AM UTC

dejb wrote: post #169

radley wrote: post #151

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. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

I can't believe this isn't the most popular comment. Kinda makes HN look a bit like a knowledge vacuum with all these recent discussions of how to ban results when a google service that's existed for nearly 5 years can do the job. The format of the results isn't quite a nice as the normal google search though.

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by kqueue » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 7:22 AM UTC

ajayjapan wrote: post #168

My question is why stackoverflow hasn't banned efreedom yet?

SO provides their database content for free under creative commons license. efreedom is not doing anything illegal.

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

#195

Post by ericd » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 8:13 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #176

prawn wrote: post #174

Earlier 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.

That's strange, though, because it should be clear to them that the long term effect of this is pretty dangerous for them - if their search results were always the best, then they would be largely unassailable in the search market, but as it is, they're decreasing satisfaction with their product. It's hard to improve everyone's perception of your product once that's happened, and it opens them up to usurpers.

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

#196

Post by nervechannel » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 10:12 AM UTC

alnayyir wrote: post #179

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ddgjlkmkllmpdheg... Is there something I'm missing here? It's not in Google's financial interest to provide this feature, but it already exists rather trivially.

Still tied to a specific browser though. Which isn't available on all platforms.

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

#197

Post by nervechannel » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 10:14 AM UTC

RP_Joe wrote: post #178

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 b…

Did I say anything in the OP about my blacklist affecting other users? Please read before ranting.

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

#198

Post by retube » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 10:28 AM UTC

iuytgyuikoiuy wrote: post #52

retube wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that happen though? efreedom must be doing something special with SEO to get higher than SO given that SO must have huge page rank score.

Pagerank is based on number/quality of links. Nobody links to an SO question, except perhaps mentioning it in a blog post. Scrapping sites create lots of links to the question, even if they are low quality ones

Yeah but does anyone link to efreedom question pages? And SO as a whole must have way more inbounds than efreedom, surely?

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

#199

Post by yason » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 10:36 AM UTC

radley wrote: post #151

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. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

Not so fast.

CSE wants you to list sites that you want to search from. Of course, you can't default to '' or '.'. They even stated that '.com' and '*.org' etc. won't return any results. That's unacceptable. Secondly, given you could configure it meaningfully it seems it's pretty hard to configure your browser's search bar to use this CSE instead.

And that's what I think most people use for searching. At least I do.

Facebook got it right this time: with each post, there's an option to hide that post, that person, that application, or that site which posted the post. One click that means "don't show stuff from them anymore": that's what Google needs, too.

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

#200

Post by eneveu » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 1:39 PM UTC

moe wrote: post #109

tomjen3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most botnets would easily have more than that number of computers. So yeah it can be done.

It would also be a significant undertaking if the down-votes are tied to google accounts. Not only do you have to bypass the captcha, but also the heuristics that google could (does?) employ to detect fake accounts. If the votes were weighted by account activity then the spammers would not only have to sign up and vote; they would also have to keep all these accounts busy with fake queries or other means.

Exactly. Google accounts have so many uses (gmail, youtube, google code, google docs, picasa...), it would be easy to detect how "active" / "real" an account is.

Of course, anything can be gamed... But it's better than nothing.

If I were to create a web-app with user-generated content, I would try to create a "trust" system based on a "reputation" / "real person" metric. It may come from his StackOverflow / reddit / HN reputation, his Google Account activity, Facebook activity...

Before buying a product based on a review I read on a forum, I always look at the author's post count / history / reputation. That's why I like HN / Reddit and their Karma systems. We need to automate that