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Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#201

Post by wakeup »

prawn wrote: post #174
AndrewO wrote: post #104

I see a lot of people asking what happens when a group of people downvote a site just to ruin its ranking. Sure that's a problem, but there's an easy solution on Google's end: your blacklist only affects you. Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me... Plus, we are talking about a company whose core business demands that it can identify groups of bad-faith voters. G…

"Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me..." efreedom is monetised by Google ads. Might seem like a problem to Google. Let's say it starts with personal blacklists. Then trusted lists that you can subscribe to (AdBlock-style). Then word spreads and enough people are using it such that AdSense revenue drops 20-30% or more? (IME, CTR on ads is much higher on these co…

Yep, boycott the nazi scum.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#202

Post by nervechannel »

yason wrote: post #199
radley wrote: post #151

Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

Not so fast. CSE wants you to list sites that you want to search from. Of course, you can't default to ' ' or ' . '. They even stated that ' .com' and '*.org' etc. won't return any results. That's unacceptable. Secondly, given you could configure it meaningfully it seems it's pretty hard to configure your browser's search bar to use this CSE instead. And that's what I think most people use for searching. At least I d…

If you leave the included sites empty, and only supply excluded sites, then it searches everything and excludes those particular ones.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#203

Post by wakeup »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #77

No, it's not particular hard, but it will make the problem worse. Why? 99% of users are non-tech oriented. Those users will not really be aware of the specific problems with the search results, they won't understand the concept of a good vs bad result and they certainly won't bother to tweak/ban/filter their results. The 1% that do care and are currently being vocal about it will start filtering their results and the…

99% have to learn how to use a blacklist. If they dont they deserve to drown in spam, its evolution.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#204

Post by nervechannel »

dejb wrote: post #169
radley wrote: post #151

Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

I can't believe this isn't the most popular comment. Kinda makes HN look a bit like a knowledge vacuum with all these recent discussions of how to ban results when a google service that's existed for nearly 5 years can do the job. The format of the results isn't quite a nice as the normal google search though.

Err, I mentioned this well before the comment above:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2075437

It's not so much that it's a knowledge vacuum, just that someone didn't read the whole thread before replying.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#205

Post by radley »

jimmyswimmy wrote: post #188
radley wrote: post #151

Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

Agree with the sibling poster - this is the best comment in the thread. Do you have any interest in sharing your hard work with us? If you go to the CSE website and select 'Advanced' and then download annotations, you can export the list of sites you've excluded. Further you can make the exclusion list ("annotation list") into a feed - so it is entirely possible to implement the kind of user-generated blacklist of si…

GCS is rather personalized, which makes sense. For example, I don't want experts-exchange showing up, but some people have paid for their service and want it. I'm also a Flash developer, so my list probably won't be useful for most HN readers.

GCS is really easy to set up - takes only a few minutes. I spent the most time hunting down rouge sites - which was actually kinda fun and cathartic.

Big tip: keep an easy-to-get-to link to the GCS Sites Control panel, so it's easy to add new sites. I've added ~40 more in the past two months.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#206

Post by radley »

yason wrote: post #199
radley wrote: post #151

Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

Not so fast. CSE wants you to list sites that you want to search from. Of course, you can't default to ' ' or ' . '. They even stated that ' .com' and '*.org' etc. won't return any results. That's unacceptable. Secondly, given you could configure it meaningfully it seems it's pretty hard to configure your browser's search bar to use this CSE instead. And that's what I think most people use for searching. At least I d…

I made my custom search secondary.

By this I mean I added it to my browsers, but I still use regular Google search daily. If the results is laden with bogus sites, then I switch over and start again, weeding if necessary.

Initially I thought I'd use GCS all the time, but it lacks the Google menu (Images, Maps, etc) which comes in handy more often than I expected. I use GCS most for code/development related searches.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#207

Post by radley »

dejb wrote: post #169
radley wrote: post #151

Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches. http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

I can't believe this isn't the most popular comment. Kinda makes HN look a bit like a knowledge vacuum with all these recent discussions of how to ban results when a google service that's existed for nearly 5 years can do the job. The format of the results isn't quite a nice as the normal google search though.

I'm on the "wrong" side of the Flash/HTML5 debate, so my average post value is really low. It wasn't a big deal until the HN algorithm got tweaked recently.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#208

Post by alnayyir »

nervechannel wrote: post #196
alnayyir wrote: post #179

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ddgjlkmkllmpdheg... Is there something I'm missing here? It's not in Google's financial interest to provide this feature, but it already exists rather trivially.

Still tied to a specific browser though. Which isn't available on all platforms.

Which platforms are that? I'm using Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux. It can be run on FreeBSD if you're willing to deal with the bridge troll running the show there.

http://i.imgur.com/1Amu3.png

Do you really think this feature doesn't exist for Firefox?

Further, it'll even sync with your google account making it global if you give it access.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#209

Post by nervechannel »

alnayyir wrote: post #208
nervechannel wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still tied to a specific browser though. Which isn't available on all platforms.

Which platforms are that? I'm using Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux. It can be run on FreeBSD if you're willing to deal with the bridge troll running the show there. http://i.imgur.com/1Amu3.png Do you really think this feature doesn't exist for Firefox? Further, it'll even sync with your google account making it global if you give it access.

Well iOS for one.

Also much as I like Chrome, I can't run it on my Linux box because the font rendering is terrible and it lets sites' font choices supersede the user's. That means I can't overrule their painful font choices with ones that look good, like I can in Firefox.

But that's another rant...

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#210

Post by alnayyir »

nervechannel wrote: post #209
alnayyir wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which platforms are that? I'm using Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux. It can be run on FreeBSD if you're willing to deal with the bridge troll running the show there. http://i.imgur.com/1Amu3.png Do you really think this feature doesn't exist for Firefox? Further, it'll even sync with your google account making it global if you give it access.

Well iOS for one. Also much as I like Chrome, I can't run it on my Linux box because the font rendering is terrible and it lets sites' font choices supersede the user's. That means I can't overrule their painful font choices with ones that look good, like I can in Firefox. But that's another rant...

>iOS for one

whistles and pops finger

> it lets sites' font choices supersede the user's

Googled, found it 5 seconds. Sure there are at least 3 other ways to do it, one of them while rubbing your tummy and patting your head.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=2121...

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