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Blocked Sites is discontinued

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Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#81

Post by anotherbadlogin »

Shank wrote: post #3
bittermang wrote: post #2

Not surprising, as the feature hasn't worked for quite some time, despite still being available to configure within your settings. I am disappointed however, because there are quite a few sites on the Internet that I would much rather not see at all, ever again. They are the noise in my search for signal in my Google search results. And the entire point of switching to Google way back in the day was the quality of th…

Personal Blacklist is an official Google extension, it just doesn't sync with anything or save to a database. At least for my purposes, I don't need it anywhere but my desktop machine to help out in result pruning (experts exchange, fixya). Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of its shutdown.

"experts exchange, fixya"

HA, yes, not being able to block these assholes really degrades Google's search results. Not to mention the dozens of spam sites re-hosting Stack Overflow content embedded in a sea of ads.

GJ, Google. You suck at marketing basically everything, and now you've degraded the one thing you did right. And this is just Google's latest offense. They already degraded their product by eliminating the ability to put "+" in front of a term to require it in results.

I might actually look at Bing now.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#82

Post by icebraining »

gee_totes wrote: post #40
monkeyfacebag wrote: post #21

I guess I need to go back to manually appending "mdn" to all my html/css/js-related queries. How much longer is w3schools going to stay at the top of those results? EDIT: Actually, it turns out I've been using the linked Chrome extension (went to install, discovered it was already installed). I just conflated the two services and forgot about the extension. So to make this productive, I recommend this extension. I ha…

/me straightens DuckDuckGo independent evangelist hat and nervously rings doorbell "Judging from your comment, you sound like the perfect user for Duck Duck Go! If you set DDG as the default browser for chrome/ff, you can search mdn with just '!mdn foo'. Also at your fingertips is searching !jquery (and hundreds of other search shortcuts) DuckDuckGo is great and makes searching super productive!" /me smiles eagerly

Or you can just go to MDN once, right click on the search box, choose "Add a Keyword (...)" and then use "mdn foo" in the URL bar.

Bang syntax seems such a small feature to change search engines.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#83

Post by maqr »

deelowe wrote: post #11
brokentone wrote: post #4

This really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange results again. Why is Google shutting every secondary project/feature down right now? Reader, labs, blocked sites, code search... Any engineers able to weigh in on how this is affecting innovation or the 80/20 policy?

Experts exchange stopped showing up in the results back when Google released the new indexing engine over a year ago. You should be fine.

But somehow Quora still has first page results.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#84

Post by anigbrowl »

emilv wrote: post #63
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #57

Note that you can continue to use the Chrome extension to block sites, which I believe we rolled out before this feature. Get it at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... And here's the blog post we did about the Chrome extension: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-...

Interestingly enough this means you have to install software on your own computer to get better search results from a company that tries to deliver a hosted ("cloud") service. Seems backwards to me.

Well, I'm with Matt on this one. When blocklist rolled out people were stressing about having their blocked selections stored in the cloud, blocking rings to kill competing sites and so on. I think it makes sense to build that functionality in at the client end.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#85

Post by elmofromok »

zorlem wrote: post #33
Shank wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal Blacklist is an official Google extension, it just doesn't sync with anything or save to a database. At least for my purposes, I don't need it anywhere but my desktop machine to help out in result pruning (experts exchange, fixya). Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of its shutdown.

>Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of its shutdown. After you go to that link and read the notification, there is another link to download the blocklist as a plain-text file. Mine contained a number of domains I've added during the years. It's quite interesting to see all the domains I've blocked so far :)

Mine was surprisingly short..

www.w3schools.com

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#86

Post by icebraining »

skylan_q wrote: post #70
ebbv wrote: post #41

Removing a feature that fixes a major shortcoming of your product (spam sites) and directing your customers to use an extension to fix it is awful. What faith I once had in Google being a company that puts users first is long gone.

Google has been shutting down features left, right and centre. I'm left wondering: what useful thing has google done since gmail and ads?

From the top of my head: V8, Golang, AngularJS, Closure Tools, Search by Image¹, Maps + Street View, Android, Now, Goggles, Fiber², Public DNS, GWT.

¹ not original, but works better than Tineye, in my opinion

² granted, only for a limited number of people

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#87

Post by gee_totes »

esbwhat wrote: post #71
gee_totes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/me straightens DuckDuckGo independent evangelist hat and nervously rings doorbell "Judging from your comment, you sound like the perfect user for Duck Duck Go! If you set DDG as the default browser for chrome/ff, you can search mdn with just '!mdn foo'. Also at your fingertips is searching !jquery (and hundreds of other search shortcuts) DuckDuckGo is great and makes searching super productive!" /me smiles eagerly

Can I ask you why you see DDG as the perfect alternative to google? One would think that if you are concerned with the sort of things google is doing, you would bank on an open source search engine, so this sort of thing doesn't just repeat itself.

Because there is less typing to do searches. As a developer, I only have a limited number of keystrokes in me before I run out and die.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#88

Post by khromov »

aw3c2 wrote: post #79
monkeyfacebag wrote: post #21

I guess I need to go back to manually appending "mdn" to all my html/css/js-related queries. How much longer is w3schools going to stay at the top of those results? EDIT: Actually, it turns out I've been using the linked Chrome extension (went to install, discovered it was already installed). I just conflated the two services and forgot about the extension. So to make this productive, I recommend this extension. I ha…

I understand all the negativity but I still often go to w3schools. Why? Because the example is right there. On MDN I always have to scroll. Loading times are also much faster with w3schools.

Agree with this. Not everything on there is right, but there's a lot of useful snippets.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#89

Post by incongruity »

Shank wrote: post #68
ChuckMcM wrote: post #52

I find both its birth and death interesting. The birth because the fact that you could mark sites as spam was one of the early talking points at Blekko, the back end architecture of our engine includes a 'selector' mechanism (slashtags) and maintaining a personal 'spam' slash tag came along for free. Its one of the features I continue to use. And then it showed up as a feature in Google's results which I found intere…

I think it'd be illogical for Google not to in some ways compete with alternatives, like Blekko in this case. Google's core business is search, and in the early days, it was this very naive behavior that allowed Google to sneak right under places like Inktomi. Just because a search engine starts small doesn't mean it can't gain traction or market, and if it has compelling enough features, it'll happen in a heartbeat.…

I'm not sure google is even clear about what its core business is, these days. It really seems quite clear that they've abandoned much of the approach and focus on being the information finder to now being the social-network wannabe.

It's as if something flipped 180 degrees - they went from being the company that wanted to help you find out about everything to being the company that wanted to find everything about you.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#90

Post by rocky1138 »

pgrote wrote: post #76
alainbryden wrote: post #54

I don't remember using this feature much, but when I downloaded my block list this is what I found: www.teachexcel.com craftkeys.com softwaretopic.informer.com www.telerik.com eggheadcafe.com www.kaboodle.com bigresource.com Damn those aggregator sites are annoying.

Why Telerik?

Every time I've gone there for ASP.NET advice it starts talking about Telerik controls, not the basic controls found in .NET.
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