81–90 of 226 posts
I just wanted to say thanks to all the people on Hacker News who asked for this option. We'll look at offering a "block site" option directly in the search results over time, but it takes longer to write, test, and launch that code. In the mean time, use this extension to clean up your own search results and tell us which sites you don't want to see in Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matt, I don’t understand why Google need to offer blocking as a user option. Any web netizen with some experience can tell at a glance the spammy and low-quality results on a SERP, but Google, with their vast knowledge and experience and their ability to monitor all sorts and aspects of user clicking behaviour, cannot?
I alluded to that in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218627 . People feel comfortable with Google removing blatant spam: hidden text, cloaking, sneaky JavaScript redirects, etc. People tend to feel less comfortable if they feel like Google is making an editorial decision. If we get a good signal from this extension, or from offering block links in Google's search results, then it's much more similar Gmail's spam…
For example, sometimes we see copies rank higher than originals. Why does that happen? Google know where they first saw a particular piece of content, don’t they? Why don’t they use that as a heavy ranking factor?
Or am I too far off?
Free karma points to whoever creates a corresponding Firefox extension...
There are a few grease monkey scripts that the same thing. I wrote my own that does this and also fetches more results to fill in the gaps left by the "This site has been blocked" entries, but sadly I forgot to back it up before I upgraded hard drives and wiped the old one.
Not quite. This sends the info to Google whereas the GM scripts just CSS display:none the links. In theory this is different since the optimist in me hopes that Google will do something positive with the "downvotes".
So HN, what sites are we all blocking?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I alluded to that in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218627 . People feel comfortable with Google removing blatant spam: hidden text, cloaking, sneaky JavaScript redirects, etc. People tend to feel less comfortable if they feel like Google is making an editorial decision. If we get a good signal from this extension, or from offering block links in Google's search results, then it's much more similar Gmail's spam…
Matt, before we get to the point where potentially controversial editorial decisions will have to be made, I would imagine there are things that could be done automatically and uncontroversially. For example, sometimes we see copies rank higher than originals. Why does that happen? Google know where they first saw a particular piece of content, don’t they? Why don’t they use that as a heavy ranking factor? Or am I to…
Now which is the original from Google's point of view? Relatively smaller blogs can take significantly longer to index then sites that have massive amounts of content moving about daily.
would be cool if there was a subscription option where you can subscribe to some master list that gets updated by people you trust. or just simply a bulk insert
A user above listed about.com as something they wanted to block, while I find them to be not very in depth, I wouldn't classify it as useless, and certainly not a content farm like livestrong.com.
I just wanted to say thanks to all the people on Hacker News who asked for this option. We'll look at offering a "block site" option directly in the search results over time, but it takes longer to write, test, and launch that code. In the mean time, use this extension to clean up your own search results and tell us which sites you don't want to see in Google.
What role did Hacker News play in bringing about this feature?
Why do I need to use Chrome and then an extension if this is being offered by Google? Make this a google labs feature directly for Google itself in the personalization options. (also please make it available via a URL option, not just cookies or javascript)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the difference in Google censoring spam and users censoring spam?
I'll pass along an anecdote from Gmail, which also uses explicit user feedback to label spam emails. Some people come to Gmail and say "Why did you block the [mass low-quality] email that I sent?" It's a pretty good answer if the reply is "Enough people marked your emails as spam that the emails were considered spam." The hope is that users are savvy enough that we can get a good signal out of the block signal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matt, before we get to the point where potentially controversial editorial decisions will have to be made, I would imagine there are things that could be done automatically and uncontroversially. For example, sometimes we see copies rank higher than originals. Why does that happen? Google know where they first saw a particular piece of content, don’t they? Why don’t they use that as a heavy ranking factor? Or am I to…
Consider this: I make a blog post on my relatively new blog examplesite.com. Techcrunch picks up on the article and immediately reposts it on their site. Which do you recon would be the first to get indexed? Now which is the original from Google's point of view? Relatively smaller blogs can take significantly longer to index then sites that have massive amounts of content moving about daily.
My small negligible personal website notifies Google, Bing and Yahoo immediately and automatically as soon as I publish something new. It also publishes a feed. Even if the content is picked up and republished right away by a site that is indexed every minute, it should be possible to determine correctly the original publisher.
In some cases, I can think of more ways to determine the original publisher. And certainly Google can think of even more.