Blocked Sites is discontinued • Hacker News Board

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#11

Post by deelowe » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:45 PM 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?

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

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#12

Post by Encosia » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:47 PM UTC

> To block particular sites from your search results, we recommend the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension from Google.

Because, you know, everyone using Google also uses Chrome and only uses it on one device.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#13

Post by itafroma » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:49 PM UTC

chacha102 wrote: post #8

This feature has been discontinued for a few months now. I'm surprised nobody posted this until now. I actually have found the plugin to be mostly adequate. There aren't a ton of sites that I feel deserve to be blocked from my search results, so syncing isn't a gigantic problem. I do find it annoying that there is a link added to each and every search result to block the site, but it might be useful if I decided to b…

I thought it was discontinued a while ago as well, but it was still in limbo as of late January of this year[1].

[1]: http://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-feature-14640...

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#14

Post by defrndr » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:49 PM UTC

No solutions for people not using Chrome?

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#15

Post by malandrew » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:50 PM 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 just want to see w3schools stop showing up at the top of results before MDN, which is a much higher quality resource.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#16

Post by brokentone » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:51 PM UTC

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.

Thanks for the update! I'm less concerned now.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#17

Post by brokentone » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:52 PM UTC

ollysb wrote: post #6

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 think they were just crowdsourcing the pruning effort. I don't have experts exchange blocked and I haven't seen it appear in my results for months.

Interesting theory, and genius if that's what they were doing with it. However, pulling it back off the market makes it look as though they failed at this.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#18

Post by just2n » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:54 PM UTC

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 therefore be ranked lower than the alternatives?

I guess not. I'm curious how they're determining quality in that case. Hey Bing, maybe you could pick this up and deliver quality results over faster results?

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#19

Post by firebrand39 » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:55 PM UTC

A very good thing is the minus sign in google search. It allows you to exclude keywords and sites. They should expand that. My searchbar gets very crowded at times.

Re: Blocked Sites is discontinued

#20

Post by philwelch » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 7:57 PM 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?

According to various sources, Larry Page had occasion to speak with Steve Jobs and ask his advice--in general terms--a few months before Jobs' death. Jobs originally wasn't inclined to give Page his time (he was still bitter about Android) but felt that, as he had reached out to an earlier generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs himself, he should pay it forward.

Jobs' advice was to focus on the most important products and prune the rest. It appears Google is now following this advice.