Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

Post by jimmyswimmy » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 6:09 PM UTC

radley wrote: post #205

jimmyswimmy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-g…

Post by prawn » Fri, Jan 07, 2011, 11:41 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #195

danudey wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I think this is the reason Google doesn't have this feature. The sites everyone wants to blacklist are the spammers that game Google search and show Google ads. If they don't get traffic, they don't show ads. If they don't show ads, Google doesn't get that money either. It's to Google's benefit that people end up on these pages, see a ton of ads, and then click on one out of confusion or desperation.

That's strange, though, because it should be clear to them that the long term effect of this is pretty dangerous for them - if their search results were always the best, then they would be largely unassailable in the search market, but as it is, they're decreasing satisfaction with their product. It's hard to improve everyone's perception of your product once that's happened, and it opens them up to usurpers.

Post by Nick_C » Sun, Jan 09, 2011, 5:25 AM UTC

CWIZO wrote: post #132

moe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a keyword that only gets 100 searches a day, it wouldn't take many down-votes to affect the rankings of the relevant sites. Why do you assume a flawed implementation? Naturally there would be thresholds. There is no reason to devalue a site that's only displayed in 100 search-results/day at all. The sites we want to hit are orders of magnitude worse at polluting the results. We're talking about the Mahalo's and e…

Is experts-exchange really a spam site? I always thought they had real users who ask&answer questions. But that they are just a crap site that hides this behind a paywall (I'm aware that the actual content is at the bottom of the page).

Post by byron8 » Sun, Jan 09, 2011, 8:05 PM UTC