Blocked Sites is discontinued • Hacker News Board

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#101

Post by jmillikin » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 12:59 AM UTC

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-...

Does the extension remove results before they are sent to the client? In other words, if a result page has ten results and three of them are blocked, will I see seven or ten result boxes on my screen?

Client-side spam blocking has been available for years. The primary advantage of having spam-blocking integrated into the search engine is that the user sees a full page of results for their query, even if some results were filtered out.

If the Chrome extension supports server-side filtering, then it must be sending some sort of "exclude results from these sites" message to google.com. It would be very nice if the message format was documented and official, even if it's something as simple as a JSON list. That would allow extension developers to add support to other major browsers, especially Firefox.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#102

Post by calebegg » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 1:13 AM UTC

polynomial wrote: post #99

eknkc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still see it sometimes. Meanwhile, Quora is in the works to become next EE...

I don't understand this comment. Quora doesn't show up in results bc they're not in the index, it's a private site. Unless that's changed?

They seem to be showing up for me. I don't have any recent organic examples, but here's query for one of the most popular threads, and the quora thread is the first result:

https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+hab...

What do you mean by "private site"?

The other objectionable/EE-like thing about it is how it hides the answers unless you log in. That really sucks.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#103

Post by jrockway » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 1:15 AM UTC

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?

I'm an engineer at Google.

20% time is alive and well, but you have to be careful when thinking that 20% time is going to magically result in fully-polished new products. How much code can you write in one day a week? How much legacy code can you maintain in one day a week? The fact that programming is hard puts an upper bound on what you can effectively accomplish in your 20% time.

Effective 20% projects, in my opinion, are projects that add something new to an existing product and whose maintenance costs are low enough to be absorbed by the project's primary contributors. I've been working on Android lint checks recently: it's something that's self-contained, can be done without interfering with my 80% project, and won't make extra work for the project's main maintainers. (It's also open source, so it can't be canceled. Hah!)

It's also worth pointing out that not all 20% projects at Google are going to be visible outside of Google. I spent my first couple quarters at Google working on maintaining the internal Emacs extensions and user-base; most of my time was spent answering questions on the mailing list. This isn't going to result in Google Maps or Gmail, but it is still needs to be done.

If you want to do something with more public impact, I think you should work towards making that idea your 80% project. Get buy-in from your peers, write a design doc or description of the product, and talk to people who work on similar projects. Once you have a team ready to work on the project, a good design, and clear criteria for success, it shouldn't be hard to become a "real" project.

(I've succeeded in doing this for an internal utility I wanted to write. I wrote a design doc, got some feedback from my peers, and asked my manager for a quarter to work on it, and did. Now it exists and has users!)

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#104

Post by calebegg » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 1:25 AM UTC

jmillikin wrote: post #101

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-...

Does the extension remove results before they are sent to the client? In other words, if a result page has ten results and three of them are blocked, will I see seven or ten result boxes on my screen? Client-side spam blocking has been available for years. The primary advantage of having spam-blocking integrated into the search engine is that the user sees a full page of results for their query, even if some results…

I was curious too, so I checked; it's pretty obviously client-side blocking; there's even a flash of the blocked result before it's hidden, which is awful.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#105

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 1:36 AM UTC

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

I'm using DDG, well, sometimes, and I really, really want to like it. But its reliability and performance -- just in producing search results let alone relevant ones, has been sorely lacking for the past 3-4 months.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#106

Post by just2n » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 1:53 AM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #25

just2n wrote: post #18

I understand this from a technical perspective, but I always thought this feature had the potential to allow Google to gather better qualitative metrics about websites. For instance, if a huge chunk of people who are searching for web-related questions (end up on SO or MDN or something) and they all have ExpertSexChange and w3schools blocked, then perhaps those should be considered qualitatively worse and would there…

i'm sure that was the original intention, and the reason for the discontinuation is that nobody used it and the cost of maintaining the feature exceeded the value of the data they gathered from it. (or else everybody blocked the same few things in the first couple weeks the feature was available, and then they stopped learning anything from the feature)

Perhaps, but when useful features see lack of use, it's usually because it's a prohibitively difficult feature to use or very poorly presented.

Maybe if it was as simple as clicking a "never see results from this website again" it would've seen orders of magnitude more use and been far more useful. Perhaps an upvote/downvote system? Seems like these are relatively tiny time investments by a couple of engineers and would serve to massively increase the quality of results. Not sure why throwing useful features away is a better decision.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#107

Post by just2n » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 1:56 AM UTC

incongruity wrote: post #89

Shank wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Might the leadership change have anything to do with that?

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#108

Post by just2n » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 2:04 AM UTC

andrewtbham wrote: post #24

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?

larry page is trying to make the company more focussed (as per the advice of steve jobs). eric schmidt had a very different and unfocused philosophy. besides google reader, most of the cuts have been good or just not important. I always felt like this feature was a reaction to blekko search engine, and not very interesting. curiously i found myself not wanting to block crappy sites like ehow just cuz they might have…

I can provide evidence that this is a horrible idea.

Try typing a phone number into google.

Go ahead, try it.

Google has improved in some regards. I recall having to look through 3-4 pages to find a decent result in some queries a few years ago. They're usually on the first or second page now, but there are still these worthless results that end up in the 1-3 spot. That's enough evidence for me that they need expert intervention, not algorithmic guessing.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#109

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 2:33 AM UTC

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…

If google is still researching AI then it is likely because the war with the spammers can't be won in any other way. Sooner or later you end up in a situation where the amount of 'spam' versus the amount of 'ham' is such that no matter how good your algorithms and how good your computing infrastructure you'll end up spitting out a lot of spam.

Human curation is a stop-gap solution, computers can generate spam faster than humans can filter it. You could argue that the humans will only have to look at the good stuff but unfortunately they'll have to look at all of it to make a decision in any practical setup.

Google has stepped up the arms race against spam and for a while their algorithms gave them an edge, now we have reached the level where the spammers have the edge again and it will take another quantum leap before the good guys can regain the edge.

It would be funny if we end up with AI mostly because of the spammers :)

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#110

Post by lazugod » Sun, Mar 24, 2013, 2:33 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #82

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

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.

How is that different from searching "mdn foo" right now?