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Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?

#121
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi will be paid when it exits beta and has this feature!

Which means you can never use it in an incognito session without logging in

My problem with it is that it removes all the agility of quickly searching incognito / with a 'fresh "ai"'

Re: Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Your concern is shared by many users and realistically speaking there is not much we can do, but hope to survive long enough to build trust. It is somewhat ironic that the only business model that has hope of not being interested in private information, does require an account. While there is nothing inherently bad with accounts, all the other services we are competing with, that have been exploiting user…

I think a big concern is some government agency basically saying "you have to start logging, and you better do it quietly." I'd suggest a warrant canary. It's better than nothing.

Our system is not designed with this tying accounts and searches in mind. Doing that change would require a major refactor and probably month or more of work, stopping everything else. I just do not see that happening.

Re: Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big concern is some government agency basically saying "you have to start logging, and you better do it quietly." I'd suggest a warrant canary. It's better than nothing.

Our system is not designed with this tying accounts and searches in mind. Doing that change would require a major refactor and probably month or more of work, stopping everything else. I just do not see that happening.

That's reassuring to know.

Re: Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?

#125
SearXNG allows to remove domains: https://github.com/searxng/searxng/blob/d1334beb4fb16beec298...

As far I understand, an improvement is to allows an URL like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/h-matsuo/uBlacklist-subscr... in settings.yml, so there is no need to update settings.yml.

Disclaimer: I am one of the maintainers of SearXNG.

Re: Ask HN: Why do search engines not let you blacklist spam domains?

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Your concern is shared by many users and realistically speaking there is not much we can do, but hope to survive long enough to build trust. It is somewhat ironic that the only business model that has hope of not being interested in private information, does require an account. While there is nothing inherently bad with accounts, all the other services we are competing with, that have been exploiting user…

At you.com we believe in user choice - private mode where we track nothing and personalized mode in an account where you can select your preferred sources like Reddit or Quora, StackOverflow, etc. For now private mode has no ads, but sadly, it might only be monetizable with private ads in the future, similar to DDG..

Hey Richard, it's been pointed out a bunch of times to you on HN over four months that "private mode" is a misnomer; people have pointed out that there are still outgoing requests to third-parties in private mode, who can do whatever they want with the data they get. DDG's private mode lacks these third-party requests.

I really like seeing more competition entering the search space and competing against Google, but it's a huge bummer when someone continually touts their "private" product while routinely ignoring comments asking for clarification around something that suggests it's not actually private.

Can you please shed some light on this?

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