Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blocked Sites is discontinued

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 141 posts

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#111

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Google's core business is advertising.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#112

Post by jacquesm »

Mahn wrote: post #58
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…

Someone should buy w3schools just to be able to remove it completely from the web. I bet we could set up a successful kickstarter around this.

That would set an awful precedent.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#113

Post by jacquesm »

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?

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#114

Post by pyre »

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

Doesn't DuckDuckGo's index come from BOSS[1]? What happens if Yahoo cuts that?

[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#115

Post by pyre »

calebegg wrote: post #102
polynomial wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

EE never hid their answers. They were only obfuscated. First[1] they made it look like the page ended, but you could scroll further and get the answers. Later, I saw that they had a section that looks like the answers, but all of the text was blurred. Again, if you scrolled past the 'end of the site' you could still get to the answers.

Looks like Quora gives you the question, and the first answer, but all other answers are Private-Only.

[1] I think that in the beginning they may have really hidden their answers, but were forced to actually show them by Google.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#116

Post by pyre »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
Mahn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should buy w3schools just to be able to remove it completely from the web. I bet we could set up a successful kickstarter around this.

That would set an awful precedent.

It already happens. Just look at some of the aquihires out there. E.g. Posterous.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#118

Post by LukeShu »

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.

I have both YaCy and Seeks (distributed open source search engines) in my FF search bar, but the results are really... disappointing. I just get good results with DDG.

DDG's commitment to privacy and not bubbling, etc. I do not believe are going away, it's their biggest selling point.

Besides, as long as RMS is demanding that DDG be the default search engine in the GNU web browser, it's good enough for me.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#120

Post by shurcooL »

lukeholder wrote: post #80
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you logged in? There is a link at the bottom of the page to download it. It isn't very prominent; I almost missed it.

im not getting it either: http://d.pr/i/CMx0

Neither am I. Could it be because I don't have any sites blocked?

It's either that, or a bug... And I can't really know which.

Post reply on HN