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Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

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Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#71

Post by sanketpatrikar »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #4
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #2

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

Is there a word for this tendency to say, "it's someone else's job" as a justification for doing nothing at all to help or improve one's own circumstances? I see more and more of it in the public discourse over the last years and it kind of bothers me. I see it a lot in conversations related to poverty or climate change, but it is as we see here by no means exclusive to those topics. To the original replyer: you coul…

I ended up creating a repo with blacklist.txt myself and will add to it for my own usage. I don't see anyone else who'd maintain this. Feel free to use it / contribute to it.

https://github.com/sanketpatrikar/hn-search-blacklist

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#72

Post by TrueDuality »

fsflover wrote: post #67

This looks like a big, time-consuming project that would rely on a private Google API that can change any time. I think it's not worth to invest your effort into that. I wish more people would help to improve FLOSS, peer-to-peer search engine YaCy instead, https://yacy.net .

This improves other search engines as well, not just the Google universe. I'm sure even an opensource, peer-to-peer search engine will have similar issues of content farm content and gamed pages if it becomes large enough to compare with search engines like DuckDuckGo.

On the other hand it is absolutely ridiculous to conflate the difficulty of occasionally adding a domain to a local filter, and assisting to build a random unproven search engine. People volunteer their development effort for projects they personally find interesting or challenging. If you want more developers advocate for the project don't try to scold people for wanting to spend a small amount of their time refining a solution that works for them.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#73

Post by tut-urut-utut »

tyingq wrote: post #55

>become worse lately thanks to all those StackOverflow and Github clones A google search showing some of these leech type sites: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22code+that+protects+users+... For me, "farath.com" is outranking stackoverflow.

Just tried your search in both Google and Duck Duck Go. On Google first page spam copies are ~80% of the links, on DDG maybe 40%. Not good, but much better than Google.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#74

Post by sanketpatrikar »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #68
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #2

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

Instead of spending energy to change Google, why not just leave them for good? Start with changing default search engine to DuckDuckGo or something else, install uBlockOrigin and Privacy Badger to disable tracking, and gradualy reduce using every Google or application, starting with Chrome. Be the change you want to see.

I relate to this opinion. There are two reasons why my suggestion might still be useful:

1. DuckDuckGo too is affected by these SEO-gaming sites, so maintaining a blacklist will help us make that experience better too.

2. There are times when only Google can find us what we're looking for, so this will prove useful when we go back to it.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#77

Post by jazzyjackson »

geofft wrote: post #63
jazzyjackson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

I think the question was specifically about declining to improve one's own circumstances because someone else could, not declining to help someone else. That's different from the bystander effect as usually conceived. The theoretical bystander effect is something like "Someone is being attacked, I could call 911 but someone else will;" this is perhaps something like "I am being attacked, I could scream for help but o…

Fair enough, maybe Learned Helplessness is a better fit.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#78

Post by sanketpatrikar »

runnerup wrote: post #10

I'd love to contribute. If my small contributions collectively have the potential to save many hours of others' time, it may end up the most impactful thing I do this year.

I created this repo.

https://github.com/sanketpatrikar/hn-search-blacklist

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#80

Post by sanketpatrikar »

dredmorbius wrote: post #65

TL;DR: I strongly suspect that relatively small, personally-curated lists will be much more appropriate and highly effective. These might be augmented with specific classifications, but probably not on a widespread basis. Though the proposed solution borrows heavily from concepts long used in email and Usenet spam, there are a few critical distinction in SEO SERP[1] spam which both make a widely-crowdsourced listing…

In that case, we'd still need a repo bringing together all these individual lists. I couldn't finding anything like this.

I suggested a single list to prevent repetition and to limit the imports one needs to make to one.

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