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I just wanted to say thanks to all the people on Hacker News who asked for this option. We'll look at offering a "block site" option directly in the search resu

I just wanted to say thanks to all the people on Hacker News who asked for this option. We'll look at offering a "block site" option directly in the search results over time, but it takes longer to write, test, and launch that code. In the mean time, use this extension to clean up your own search results and tell us which sites you don't want to see in Google.

blehn 16y ago
Thanks for listening to our requests!
demetris 16y ago
Matt, I don’t understand why Google need to offer blocking as a user option. Any web netizen with some experience can tell at a glance the spammy and low-quality results on a SERP, but Google, with their vast knowledge and experience and their ability to monitor all sorts and aspects of user clicking behaviour, cannot?
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  I alluded to that in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218627 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218627 . People feel comfortable with Google removing blatant spam: hidden text, cloaking, sneaky JavaScript redirects, etc. People tend to feel less comfortable if they feel like Google is making an editorial decision. If we get a good signal from this extension, or from offering block links in Google's search results, then it's much more similar Gmail's spam algorithm, where an email is labelled as spam partially because a lot of users say it is, rather than because of some editorial decision on our part.
  - aubergene 16y ago
    I'm really glad this extension exists. However, if it is built in to the general results, could you also add a metric to Webmaster Tools showing the frequency with which your domain is reported. It would also be good if the blocking could have timeout period so that sites can be given a chance to improve their behavior, rather than just deleting that domain forever.
    - davros 16y ago
      +1 to a report in WMT - to detect problems in our sites and also potentially abuse.
  - demetris 16y ago
    Matt, before we get to the point where potentially controversial editorial decisions will have to be made, I would imagine there are things that could be done automatically and uncontroversially. For example, sometimes we see copies rank higher than originals. Why does that happen? Google know where they first saw a particular piece of content, don’t they? Why don’t they use that as a heavy ranking factor? Or am I too far off?
    - thenayr 16y ago
      Consider this: I make a blog post on my relatively new blog examplesite.com. Techcrunch picks up on the article and immediately reposts it on their site. Which do you recon would be the first to get indexed? Now which is the original from Google's point of view? Relatively smaller blogs can take significantly longer to index then sites that have massive amounts of content moving about daily.
      - demetris 16y ago
        I have thought about that and I cannot believe it is really a problem. My small negligible personal website notifies Google, Bing and Yahoo immediately and automatically as soon as I publish something new. It also publishes a feed. Even if the content is picked up and republished right away by a site that is indexed every minute, it should be possible to determine correctly the original publisher. In some cases, I can think of more ways to determine the original publisher. And certainly Google can think of even more.
        subsection1h 16y ago
        > I can think of more ways to determine the original publisher. Please share them. Thanks.
        demetris 16y ago
        Here is one scenario that comes easily to mind: I publish an article at only-original-content.com. The article has some images that are served from only-original-content.com/images. Now only-copied-content.com takes my original article and republishes it. Since only-copied-content simply copied the HTML, the images are still served from only-original-content.com/images. In that case it should be simple to determine who is the original publisher. Of course, only-original-content.com could simply be a CDN that only-copied-content.com uses for its static resources, but, again, it should be easy to determine whether that is the case.
  - cbs 16y ago
    I understand the fine line you have to walk, and I'm glad to see that you guys take it as seriously as you do. Personally, I'm glad that you're putting this out as a user-controlled thing. I like the fact I'm able to get rid of results that aren't necessarily spam or SEO'ed garbage, but I where I still know that I never want to see results from that site again.
  - derefr 16y ago
    You already have the SafeSearch filter that can be toggled on and off to show you different search results. Why not an Editorial filter as well (perhaps disabled by default)?
- scott_s 16y ago
  A "web netizen" is intelligent. Google - as you're using the term - is a sophisticated piece of software that leverages much of what we know about AI, but it is not actually intelligent. The determination you're making that something is spam and not worth your time may be simple for you to make, but it's hard to get software to consistently make the same determination.
- narrator 16y ago
  Another thing to keep in mind is to think about how many unique search queries are entered into Google on a daily basis. I don't know what the figure is at Google, but some engineer at Bing said that 25% of searches they've never seen before. You can't get a human to look at each of these searches and remove the content farms, you have to do it algorithmically or else it will never work. Getting users to do the work will help with the most egregious abuses. One thing that content farms are good at is coming up with answers for questions that don't have an answer available on-line. For example, the query "what's the personal cell phone number of <insert celebrity>?" will just take you to a spam farm because that's the only kind of website that claims to know the answer.
- mckoss 16y ago
  It's one thing for an individual user to ask not to be bothered by results from an entire domain. It's quite another for Google to make that call for EVERYONE. I think this is a great first step. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against a domain, I would hope that Google would use that as a strong negative signal against the domain to adjust the ranking of the site.
falsestprophet 16y ago
What role did Hacker News play in bringing about this feature?
- moultano 16y ago
  Market validation. :)
- omeega 16y ago
  Thats a very important question, as without an answer it seems like the original comment is just excellent Public Relations. *Did not mean to imply that it is PR :)
  - dschobel 16y ago
    I think the fact that Matt frequently comes in here to discuss Google's search results shows that it is not just PR. Unless you want to categorize everything Matt says publicly (whether here, on his blog or on twitter) as PR...
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    I asked a member of the webspam team to prototype the extension after reading this Hacker News comment on January 1st: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2058408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2058408 We've absolutely done similar things in the past, but that comment was the spark behind this most recent Chrome extension. I hope that's specific enough. :)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ErrantX 16y ago
So, does this mean expertsexchange will eventually get shoved down the search results? (AKA great stuff!)
- simpleenigma 16y ago
  I installed the extension and blocked experts exchange first thing ... not sure if I'll even use it for any other sites ...
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    Snap. I wonder how many others did the same.. going to guess a reasonable number.
  - s3graham 16y ago
    I immediately dropped velocityreviews.com, bytes.com, and about.com too.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - SwellJoe 16y ago
    ehow.com, ezinearticles.com. I'm sure there are many others, but those piss me off daily.
    - lambda 16y ago
      Yeah, those and WiseGeek for me. I keep on getting WiseGeek in searches (especially if I search for a question, which I occasionally do) and the content is complete and utter crap.
    - user24 16y ago
      eggheadcafe (example: http://bit.ly/fxIaKE http://bit.ly/fxIaKE )
- Shamiq 16y ago
steve19 16y ago
Thanks Matt. Will you be offering a Firefox extension?
rakkhi 16y ago
Matt do you think this will be abused at all? I.e. organized blocking of sites on mass to push it down rankings? Is your block list something that will be synced so that it is available everywhere you use Chrome and eventually just synced with your Google account?
- tchvil 16y ago
  On top of counting the block votes, Google could check if the site is crippled by AdSense links. This could filter some shot-down-my-competitor efforts.
thornjm 16y ago
In addition to removing the blocked site from the search results would it be possible to be able to remove a site's contribution to pagerank? I feel that this would probably be more effective in the long run...
tchvil 16y ago
Do you plan to release the list of blocked sites to the public?
AlexC04 16y ago
This is great, thanks Matt. After using this for less that 12 hours and I think it's fantastic. I also think it could be vastly improved upon. What if you added reddit style "up" and "down" votes to my results? Maybe it sounds silly at first pass, but if all my votes get passed back to Google, your algorithms could learn from an incredible crowd-source treasure trove of knowledge. A black list wouldn't just help you find the bad ones - but up-boats could help you suss the good ones. There's the concern of DIGG style voting blocks, but perhaps even that could be detected by sufficiently sophistimatacted algorithms. (detection of pairity in voting that fell outside of statistical norms could be downgraded in quality). I mean, sure, I'm already gaming the system in my head ... automated creation of accounts, automated up-boating (which I suspect happens on Reddit as well, despite being bad "reddiquette") OK. Actually, maybe it's a terrible idea. Like DIGG with only down-votes. Seems like a potential treasure trove though. Right?

blehn 16y ago

Thanks for listening to our requests!

demetris 16y ago

Matt, I don’t understand why Google need to offer blocking as a user option. Any web netizen with some experience can tell at a glance the spammy and low-quality results on a SERP, but Google, with their vast knowledge and experience and their ability to monitor all sorts and aspects of user clicking behaviour, cannot?

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
I alluded to that in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218627 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218627 . People feel comfortable with Google removing blatant spam: hidden text, cloaking, sneaky JavaScript redirects, etc. People tend to feel less comfortable if they feel like Google is making an editorial decision. If we get a good signal from this extension, or from offering block links in Google's search results, then it's much more similar Gmail's spam algorithm, where an email is labelled as spam partially because a lot of users say it is, rather than because of some editorial decision on our part.
- aubergene 16y ago
  I'm really glad this extension exists. However, if it is built in to the general results, could you also add a metric to Webmaster Tools showing the frequency with which your domain is reported. It would also be good if the blocking could have timeout period so that sites can be given a chance to improve their behavior, rather than just deleting that domain forever.
  - davros 16y ago
    +1 to a report in WMT - to detect problems in our sites and also potentially abuse.
- demetris 16y ago
  Matt, before we get to the point where potentially controversial editorial decisions will have to be made, I would imagine there are things that could be done automatically and uncontroversially. For example, sometimes we see copies rank higher than originals. Why does that happen? Google know where they first saw a particular piece of content, don’t they? Why don’t they use that as a heavy ranking factor? Or am I too far off?
  - thenayr 16y ago
    Consider this: I make a blog post on my relatively new blog examplesite.com. Techcrunch picks up on the article and immediately reposts it on their site. Which do you recon would be the first to get indexed? Now which is the original from Google's point of view? Relatively smaller blogs can take significantly longer to index then sites that have massive amounts of content moving about daily.
    - demetris 16y ago
      I have thought about that and I cannot believe it is really a problem. My small negligible personal website notifies Google, Bing and Yahoo immediately and automatically as soon as I publish something new. It also publishes a feed. Even if the content is picked up and republished right away by a site that is indexed every minute, it should be possible to determine correctly the original publisher. In some cases, I can think of more ways to determine the original publisher. And certainly Google can think of even more.
      - subsection1h 16y ago
        > I can think of more ways to determine the original publisher. Please share them. Thanks.
        demetris 16y ago
        Here is one scenario that comes easily to mind: I publish an article at only-original-content.com. The article has some images that are served from only-original-content.com/images. Now only-copied-content.com takes my original article and republishes it. Since only-copied-content simply copied the HTML, the images are still served from only-original-content.com/images. In that case it should be simple to determine who is the original publisher. Of course, only-original-content.com could simply be a CDN that only-copied-content.com uses for its static resources, but, again, it should be easy to determine whether that is the case.
- cbs 16y ago
  I understand the fine line you have to walk, and I'm glad to see that you guys take it as seriously as you do. Personally, I'm glad that you're putting this out as a user-controlled thing. I like the fact I'm able to get rid of results that aren't necessarily spam or SEO'ed garbage, but I where I still know that I never want to see results from that site again.
- derefr 16y ago
  You already have the SafeSearch filter that can be toggled on and off to show you different search results. Why not an Editorial filter as well (perhaps disabled by default)?
scott_s 16y ago
A "web netizen" is intelligent. Google - as you're using the term - is a sophisticated piece of software that leverages much of what we know about AI, but it is not actually intelligent. The determination you're making that something is spam and not worth your time may be simple for you to make, but it's hard to get software to consistently make the same determination.
narrator 16y ago
Another thing to keep in mind is to think about how many unique search queries are entered into Google on a daily basis. I don't know what the figure is at Google, but some engineer at Bing said that 25% of searches they've never seen before. You can't get a human to look at each of these searches and remove the content farms, you have to do it algorithmically or else it will never work. Getting users to do the work will help with the most egregious abuses. One thing that content farms are good at is coming up with answers for questions that don't have an answer available on-line. For example, the query "what's the personal cell phone number of <insert celebrity>?" will just take you to a spam farm because that's the only kind of website that claims to know the answer.
mckoss 16y ago
It's one thing for an individual user to ask not to be bothered by results from an entire domain. It's quite another for Google to make that call for EVERYONE. I think this is a great first step. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against a domain, I would hope that Google would use that as a strong negative signal against the domain to adjust the ranking of the site.

falsestprophet 16y ago

What role did Hacker News play in bringing about this feature?

moultano 16y ago
Market validation. :)
omeega 16y ago
Thats a very important question, as without an answer it seems like the original comment is just excellent Public Relations. *Did not mean to imply that it is PR :)
- dschobel 16y ago
  I think the fact that Matt frequently comes in here to discuss Google's search results shows that it is not just PR. Unless you want to categorize everything Matt says publicly (whether here, on his blog or on twitter) as PR...
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  I asked a member of the webspam team to prototype the extension after reading this Hacker News comment on January 1st: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2058408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2058408 We've absolutely done similar things in the past, but that comment was the spark behind this most recent Chrome extension. I hope that's specific enough. :)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ErrantX 16y ago

So, does this mean expertsexchange will eventually get shoved down the search results? (AKA great stuff!)

simpleenigma 16y ago
I installed the extension and blocked experts exchange first thing ... not sure if I'll even use it for any other sites ...
- ErrantX 16y ago
  Snap. I wonder how many others did the same.. going to guess a reasonable number.
- s3graham 16y ago
  I immediately dropped velocityreviews.com, bytes.com, and about.com too.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- SwellJoe 16y ago
  ehow.com, ezinearticles.com. I'm sure there are many others, but those piss me off daily.
  - lambda 16y ago
    Yeah, those and WiseGeek for me. I keep on getting WiseGeek in searches (especially if I search for a question, which I occasionally do) and the content is complete and utter crap.
  - user24 16y ago
    eggheadcafe (example: http://bit.ly/fxIaKE http://bit.ly/fxIaKE )
Shamiq 16y ago

steve19 16y ago

Thanks Matt. Will you be offering a Firefox extension?

rakkhi 16y ago

Matt do you think this will be abused at all? I.e. organized blocking of sites on mass to push it down rankings? Is your block list something that will be synced so that it is available everywhere you use Chrome and eventually just synced with your Google account?

tchvil 16y ago
On top of counting the block votes, Google could check if the site is crippled by AdSense links. This could filter some shot-down-my-competitor efforts.

thornjm 16y ago

In addition to removing the blocked site from the search results would it be possible to be able to remove a site's contribution to pagerank? I feel that this would probably be more effective in the long run...

tchvil 16y ago

Do you plan to release the list of blocked sites to the public?

AlexC04 16y ago

This is great, thanks Matt. After using this for less that 12 hours and I think it's fantastic. I also think it could be vastly improved upon. What if you added reddit style "up" and "down" votes to my results? Maybe it sounds silly at first pass, but if all my votes get passed back to Google, your algorithms could learn from an incredible crowd-source treasure trove of knowledge. A black list wouldn't just help you find the bad ones - but up-boats could help you suss the good ones. There's the concern of DIGG style voting blocks, but perhaps even that could be detected by sufficiently sophistimatacted algorithms. (detection of pairity in voting that fell outside of statistical norms could be downgraded in quality). I mean, sure, I'm already gaming the system in my head ... automated creation of accounts, automated up-boating (which I suspect happens on Reddit as well, despite being bad "reddiquette") OK. Actually, maybe it's a terrible idea. Like DIGG with only down-votes. Seems like a potential treasure trove though. Right?