8 ms·

Google: Hide sites to find more of what you want

222 points by ssclafani 16y ago

cake 16y ago
I wonder why Google prefers that you block a whole domain instead of a result (what searchwiki did). As said in another comment I wouldn't be confortable to block the whole expertsexchange.com domain, I get revelant results sometimes, yet some of the results of the same website are so unhelpful I'm sure I don't want to see them again (auto approved solutions and stuff like that). It also happens when I search for something I already searched for a while back. Some of the results remain irrevelant, but not necessarily the whole domain.
- rsoto 16y ago
  I think their reasoning is that if you really want to delete something from the results, it has to be really bad. Hence, you'll likely not want to receive search results from that same site. But I'm no Matt Cutts. Btw, is the link showing up for everybody? It is not for me.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Because there are a raft of bad actors out there with junk sites. Removing them utterly from your personal existence can help make search much more useful. Examples: - Yahoo! Answers - Ezine Articles - Those Efreedom assholes - Experts Exchange (your experience aside, this place is crap for most everyone else) - All the junk sites around appliance manuals - All the other content farms
erik_p 16y ago
This seems like a great idea to block the really bad offenders, but doesn't seem granular enough for the sites that have inconsistent quality of content (i.e. a user generated content site can have both shallow/crappy content AND useful content under the same domain). I wish we could give more contextual feedback, like... THIS link was helpful/relevant, THIS link was not.
- stanleydrew 16y ago
  It's not intended for use on sites with inconsistent quality. PageRank takes care of the individual pages on those sites.
  - erik_p 16y ago
    How can that intent of purpose be conveyed to the user when they are blacklisting whole sites? They aren't using these blacklisting as a signal for influencing the google algo, YET... but it seems inevitable. I'm just trying to say it seems a little too much like an axe instead of a scalpel. Personally I can't wait to start rage blocking domains that have pop over modals for surveys / advertising, or have sound enabled by default.
    - stanleydrew 16y ago
      That's a fair question. Since they aren't using user blacklists as a signal yet I will punt. Were they to start, then I think you have a point that finer-grained data is preferred. They should probably offer both options in that case, i.e. "don't show this result anymore" and "don't show any results from bar.example.com anymore."
taylorbuley 16y ago
Anyone have a list of "bigresource" like sources of bad programming tips? I have been using site:stackoverflow.com but would prefer just to block sites like this: http://mysql.bigresource.com/Fatal-error-Can-t-open-privilege-tables-Table-mysql-host-doesn-t-exist-JWCFO5og.html http://mysql.bigresource.com/Fatal-error-Can-t-open-privileg...
al_james 16y ago
Excellent. Thanks Google, you have just saved my sanity. So can I disable the chrome plugin now? Will it remember the sites I have already blocked?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- EricBurnett 16y ago
  Check the block list on http://www.google.com/reviews/t http://www.google.com/reviews/t . If it lists the pages you blocked through the extension, you'll be good to go. Otherwise you can always add them manually.
  - al_james 16y ago
    Good call. No, you have to start again. Oh well, not a big deal. Note you can only block 500 sites, I should think thats enough though.
deleted 16y ago
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sjs382 16y ago
Wow. Can't believe how quickly this was added to Google Search, rather than it remaining a Chrome Extension for a long time. Glad to see it, though!
- cryptoz 16y ago
  I think one of Google's "secret" weapons is their incredibly fast innovation and time-to-market. Their rivals spend years building a product in secret (e.g., Windows) and then release a giant binary blob to the world whether the world wants it or not. Google's fast-paced changes to their core product are a huge part of what keeps them on top.
  - jonursenbach 16y ago
    They're fast at building stuff when it isn't social.
    - hyperbovine 16y ago
      Truer that you realize: this is a reverse Like button. It's antisocial.
    - hyperbovine 16y ago
      Truer that you realize: this is a reverse Like button. It's antisocial.
  - oldstrangers 16y ago
    One of the advantages ex-googlers cite as a reason for joining facebook is that facebook is much faster at deploying new things. Google has been nortiously slow with most things. As per the windows comparison, Microsoft releases updates for their windows products almost daily so I dont see much difference.
    - cryptoz 16y ago
      > Microsoft releases updates for their windows products almost daily so I dont see much difference. Sure, but these are minor updates. Look at the major updates. Windows Vista was developed for about 5 years in secret, and when it was eventually released to the world it was a disaster. To keep with the OS comparison, Google has been releasing major OS upgrades every 6 months - 1 year. Android is moving so much faster than Windows or even WP7 and is a huge part of why it's successful. In the time that WP7 has been out (five months? ish?) there have been 0 updates to most phones; maybe a few phones got the small update-to-the-updater. With that same period of time Google has announced and released a new Android version.
Tycho 16y ago
If the spammers and content-farms were the Empire, this would be like blowing up the Death Star. Brilliant.
pedrokost 16y ago
Many people already know what sites they don't want, and never open these links. But to block those links, do users really have to open a link and return to Google to block it? Also, the sites that have already been blocked with the extension, will they be auto-blocked?
- ejdyksen 16y ago
  You could also just go here and add manually to your heart's content: http://www.google.com/reviews/t http://www.google.com/reviews/t
- MatthewPhillips 16y ago
  I think it's to avoid accidental blocks.
- jakewalker 16y ago
  Agree - - would love to see a Chrome extension that will give me a one-click button to add the domain of the page I'm currently on (presumably after having clicked on it from a Google search) added to my block list.
nswanberg 16y ago
It would be interesting to see the percentage of Google users that that block even one site. Though even if it's a small percentage it could help the blockers take out their search frustrations by blocking a site, and help the non-blockers by giving Google hints as to what searchers don't like. The magical optimization I would prefer would be a non-commercial search. If I search for a piece of gear sometimes I don't want to buy it and instead want to weigh buying it or just look up reference information. For some searches that is tough, and permanently blocking commercial sites isn't an option. (I've occassionally resorted to limiting my searches to .edu and .org domains with limited success). Even temporarily blocking commercial sites might not help, though, since sites like Amazon.com have fantastic reviews on some items.
- ShabbyDoo 16y ago
  "by giving Google hints as to what searchers don't like." Crowd-sourced curation -- this must be Google's eventual goal for the "blocking" feature. Can't content farms be thought of as spam? And, if so, don't the same techniques for spam identification apply, especially the "mark as spam" button in Gmail? [Conjecture and speculation below as there's no evidence Google is going to modify search results based on users' blocking propensities, but I think the possibilities are worthy of consideration.] I wonder how this scheme could be gamed? Consider how one might game spam filters to cause a target's future mailings to end up marked as spam. To hit a high-volume target, one would have to cause a ton of email addresses under his control to be placed on the senders distribution list. Then, when messages arrived, he would mark them all as spam. Although the total percentage of the sender's mailing list comprised of the bad guy's email addresses might be small, this technique would still be effective because the percentage of "activist" recipients required to flag any sender as a spammer is so low (at least I'm told). To address this problem, Google could certainly apply schemes similar to those used to identify click fraud. Such countermeasures would require the bad guy to make his attack appear more organic. Have there been actual instances of such denial-of-service attacks? With a similar strategy, could, say, an anti-abortion group enlist its membership to banish pro-abortion groups' websites from search results? What if members were instructed to search for phrases like "How to get an abortion" and block Planned Parenthood, etc.? The difference between websites and email lists is that the owner of an email list has direct control and could take countermeasures like changing mail servers, etc. Also, large bulk mailers (MailChimp, etc.) generally have good relationships with large email box providers like Google and can therefore plead their clients' cases directly to a responsible person. How would pro-abortion groups get attention from Google if their site rankings dropped due to such grassroots organizing? Would Google be able to identify this as an orchestrated effort? How would the behavioral patterns of pro/anti-abortion activists be any different than this forum's treatment of Experts Exchange? Google will observe that one small segment of its userbase blocks the site in high numbers but another segment, when searching for the same terms (MySQL failure XYZ) click on Experts Exchange results? Wouldn't users actually seeking information on how to get an abortion recognize the name "Planned Parenthood" and click on those same results which were blocked by activists?
deleted 16y ago
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mitjak 16y ago
Quick, block expertsexchange!
- mrleinad 16y ago
  Regardless of how insanely irritating their site is, I've found my answer there.. about once or twice. But I wouldn't block them entirely..
  - ceejayoz 16y ago
    I've found answers there, too, but I've yet to encounter a situation where they're the only place an answer is found. Now that StackOverflow is around I suspect that's even less likely.
  - nswanberg 16y ago
    Perhaps Google could introduce an "I'm Feeling Desperate" button for the times you just know your result lies within one of your previously blocked sites.
    - Peaker 16y ago
      You could log out..
  - mitjak 16y ago
    My problem usually, contrasting other comments here, is that I don't look at the URL of the link I'm clicking on but primarily at the title. Since a lot of questions on EE are very specific, I often click by accident since the question sounds a lot like what I'm looking to find an answer for, only to grunt at having to scroll all the down ("Ok, I'll give them one more try..") where no answer usually is found.
- richbradshaw 16y ago
  First thing I did!
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jmillikin 16y ago
Just tried it out with the manual block page at < http://www.google.com/reviews/t http://www.google.com/reviews/t > I notice that when I block a subdomain (eg, http://answers.yahoo.com/ http://answers.yahoo.com/ ) the page actually shows the entire domain (yahoo.com) as blocked. Is this just an error in the display, or does it actually only block based on domain? If the second, this significantly limits the usability, since I can't block < http://someobviouslinkspam.blogspot.com http://someobviouslinkspam.blogspot.com > without also blocking every blogspot.com site.
- thisisananth 16y ago
  I just observed that for blogs like http://somespam.blogspot.com http://somespam.blogspot.com, it allows you to block somesmap.blogspot.com alone, not the whole blogspot domain. It is the same for wordpress also.
- jonursenbach 16y ago
  Having the same answers.yahoo.com issue here. Very weird. Edit: Clicking on "show details" it says that answers.yahoo.com is blocked, so maybe they're only showing the base domain here. Still weird.
  - jmillikin 16y ago
    Click "Download as text file" -- only yahoo.com is included in the download. Based on the file contents (UNIX line endings), I'm guessing that's a raw-ish dump of the database contents.
dserodio 16y ago
I don't see this button on google.com.br I hope it's propagated to international Google pages soon.
afhof 16y ago
What happens if you block Google?
- MatthewPhillips 16y ago
  Time-space breaks down. Don't do it! The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if in a few months users are mysteriously going to have facebook.com added to their block list.
  - mitjak 16y ago
    That'll just block Facebook from showing up in Google results which they never did in the first place unless you searched for someone's name.
- cpeterso 16y ago
  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=about:blank" />
ChuckMcM 16y ago
Ah, good to see Google following our lead :-) (Disclaimer I work at Blekko and we've had this feature from launch, and we don't limit you to 500 sites either) On a more serious note though, its nice to see Google validate our assertion, that un-modified Google search results are getting poorer and poorer. Not that they would actually say it directly like that of course. Now lets see if they are willing to drop over a million crappy sites out of their index ...
- rsoto 16y ago
  I just lost a little of respect from you guys with this comment.
  - mistermann 16y ago
    I didn't, I think its true. I'm shocked google actually did this, it will cost them money in advertising dollars, and I honestly thought some of their technical decisions were being driven by maximizing revenue at almost any cost, so this move seems to invalidate that theory. Kudos to google I say.
    - lwat 16y ago
      Losing users will also cost them money in advertising dollars.
      - Andrewski 16y ago
        SEO spam has no actual users bro.
        lwat 16y ago
        I mean Google. They'll lose users if they don't do something about the SEO spam.
        digitaltothem 16y ago
shimonamit 16y ago
Now, if they could only provide a way to disable previews...
- thezilch 16y ago
  Click the magnifying glass on any search-return item.
gwern 16y ago
For me, this is frustrating because it's not that useful in general search results, but it would be extremely useful in pruning Custom Search Engine results - and that's exactly where it isn't. I want a one-click way to ban a domain from search engine results because most blacklisted domains in my Wikipedia search engine (http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=009114923999563836576:1eorkzz2gp4 http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=009114923999563836576:1eor...) are porn or filesharing sites. One recognizes such spam in an instant, but it still takes a while to prune down the URL to the right domain, flip to the edit tab, paste it in, flip back, and relocate myself. I'm not kidding when I say such a one-click button would cut by at least half the time I have to put into cleaning up the CSE results for any given query.
bcrescimanno 16y ago
Aside from the "big two" (experts exchange and Mahalo) I actually think the one I'll block first is Wikipedia. Truthfully, I really like Wikipedia as a resource and love to peruse the information there--but if I want the article from Wikipedia, I'll go to Wikipedia and look it up. If I'm searching google, it's probably for something that's not going to be covered well by Wikipedia anyway. For example, let's say someone has suggested to me to use the factory pattern to solve a problem in a project and I'm not intimately familiar with that pattern. I search for "Factory design pattern" on Google and notice that the first 2 results are wikipedia results. There's some good, basic boiler plate--but that's not what I need (Ok, what I really need is probably a trusty copy of the "Gang of Four" so maybe it's a bad--or at least contrived example).
- mikexstudios 16y ago
  I disagree. Having wikipedia results at the top of my google searches has been extremely useful. It's easier to find a wikipedia page through google rather than search on the wikipedia site.
  - bcrescimanno 16y ago
    That's a fair point; though I generally use Google for, "I want something better than the encyclopedia treatment" on a topic.
Limes102 16y ago
I have been waiting for this so I can hide Experts Exchange.
eykanal 16y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I switched to Bing a few weeks ago, and I'm finding a pretty good increase in search result quality. For me, good search by default > good search only with my help. OTOH, I imagine that bing will also eventually succumb to content farms and other techniques that will come up, so maybe this is the way of the future.
geuis 16y ago
Not sure why they are limiting this to particular browser versions. If I'm running IE7 (which I'm not), what does that have to do with which sites I want to block?
- tonfa 16y ago
  Maybe the way they detect you went back to the search result depends on the modern browser functionality.
gxs 16y ago
You know, maybe I'm just slow and don't see the big picture, but I don't understand what all the hubub is about. The '-' operator has worked wonders for me for years.
- rglullis 16y ago
  Do you type "-mahalo.com -efreedom.net -allthespamblogsthatannoyme.com", every time you do a search?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Stormbringer 16y ago
  I for one am looking forward to typing a technical question and then not getting hundreds of hits from those sites that want to charge money for the answer. (And to head off the obvious karma steal at the pass - Because sometimes the answer isn't in stackoverflow yet. Duh)
AlexC04 16y ago
As an experiment, I thought I'd block FoxNews from my results to see if it would stop coming up in my "google news" aggregator. Sadly, it does not. Would have been neat though.
- cpeterso 16y ago
  Google News' Settings allows you to configure "more news from" and "less news from" by publisher. More news from: NPR The Economist Wired News Less news from: FOXNews FOXSports.com Wall Street Journal http://news.google.com/news/settings http://news.google.com/news/settings
deleted 16y ago
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paolomaffei 16y ago
Now I'd only wish people to be able to share lists with friends, just like you download blocking lists from adblock :) But in the meanwhile good riddance Mahalo, eHow, Yahoo Answers and ExpertSExchange, etc
pbiggar 16y ago
Hopefully this will get combined with Google Alerts, so I have a one-click way to tell google that people are creating spam on topics I care about.
bretthellman 16y ago
What's next? Build your own search results
TGJ 16y ago
That's awesome. I'm glad they are giving the users more options. I searched for how to bake a cake to finally block ehow from my results. How good that feels. Trash sites are about to feel the sting I imagine. That reminds me, need to block about.com too.

222 points by ssclafani 16y ago

cake 16y ago

I wonder why Google prefers that you block a whole domain instead of a result (what searchwiki did). As said in another comment I wouldn't be confortable to block the whole expertsexchange.com domain, I get revelant results sometimes, yet some of the results of the same website are so unhelpful I'm sure I don't want to see them again (auto approved solutions and stuff like that). It also happens when I search for something I already searched for a while back. Some of the results remain irrevelant, but not necessarily the whole domain.

rsoto 16y ago
I think their reasoning is that if you really want to delete something from the results, it has to be really bad. Hence, you'll likely not want to receive search results from that same site. But I'm no Matt Cutts. Btw, is the link showing up for everybody? It is not for me.
danilocampos 16y ago
Because there are a raft of bad actors out there with junk sites. Removing them utterly from your personal existence can help make search much more useful. Examples: - Yahoo! Answers - Ezine Articles - Those Efreedom assholes - Experts Exchange (your experience aside, this place is crap for most everyone else) - All the junk sites around appliance manuals - All the other content farms

erik_p 16y ago

This seems like a great idea to block the really bad offenders, but doesn't seem granular enough for the sites that have inconsistent quality of content (i.e. a user generated content site can have both shallow/crappy content AND useful content under the same domain). I wish we could give more contextual feedback, like... THIS link was helpful/relevant, THIS link was not.

stanleydrew 16y ago
It's not intended for use on sites with inconsistent quality. PageRank takes care of the individual pages on those sites.
- erik_p 16y ago
  How can that intent of purpose be conveyed to the user when they are blacklisting whole sites? They aren't using these blacklisting as a signal for influencing the google algo, YET... but it seems inevitable. I'm just trying to say it seems a little too much like an axe instead of a scalpel. Personally I can't wait to start rage blocking domains that have pop over modals for surveys / advertising, or have sound enabled by default.
  - stanleydrew 16y ago
    That's a fair question. Since they aren't using user blacklists as a signal yet I will punt. Were they to start, then I think you have a point that finer-grained data is preferred. They should probably offer both options in that case, i.e. "don't show this result anymore" and "don't show any results from bar.example.com anymore."

taylorbuley 16y ago

Anyone have a list of "bigresource" like sources of bad programming tips? I have been using site:stackoverflow.com but would prefer just to block sites like this: http://mysql.bigresource.com/Fatal-error-Can-t-open-privilege-tables-Table-mysql-host-doesn-t-exist-JWCFO5og.html http://mysql.bigresource.com/Fatal-error-Can-t-open-privileg...

al_james 16y ago

Excellent. Thanks Google, you have just saved my sanity. So can I disable the chrome plugin now? Will it remember the sites I have already blocked?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
EricBurnett 16y ago
Check the block list on http://www.google.com/reviews/t http://www.google.com/reviews/t . If it lists the pages you blocked through the extension, you'll be good to go. Otherwise you can always add them manually.
- al_james 16y ago
  Good call. No, you have to start again. Oh well, not a big deal. Note you can only block 500 sites, I should think thats enough though.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sjs382 16y ago

Wow. Can't believe how quickly this was added to Google Search, rather than it remaining a Chrome Extension for a long time. Glad to see it, though!

cryptoz 16y ago
I think one of Google's "secret" weapons is their incredibly fast innovation and time-to-market. Their rivals spend years building a product in secret (e.g., Windows) and then release a giant binary blob to the world whether the world wants it or not. Google's fast-paced changes to their core product are a huge part of what keeps them on top.
- jonursenbach 16y ago
  They're fast at building stuff when it isn't social.
  - hyperbovine 16y ago
    Truer that you realize: this is a reverse Like button. It's antisocial.
  - hyperbovine 16y ago
    Truer that you realize: this is a reverse Like button. It's antisocial.
- oldstrangers 16y ago
  One of the advantages ex-googlers cite as a reason for joining facebook is that facebook is much faster at deploying new things. Google has been nortiously slow with most things. As per the windows comparison, Microsoft releases updates for their windows products almost daily so I dont see much difference.
  - cryptoz 16y ago
    > Microsoft releases updates for their windows products almost daily so I dont see much difference. Sure, but these are minor updates. Look at the major updates. Windows Vista was developed for about 5 years in secret, and when it was eventually released to the world it was a disaster. To keep with the OS comparison, Google has been releasing major OS upgrades every 6 months - 1 year. Android is moving so much faster than Windows or even WP7 and is a huge part of why it's successful. In the time that WP7 has been out (five months? ish?) there have been 0 updates to most phones; maybe a few phones got the small update-to-the-updater. With that same period of time Google has announced and released a new Android version.

Tycho 16y ago

If the spammers and content-farms were the Empire, this would be like blowing up the Death Star. Brilliant.

pedrokost 16y ago

Many people already know what sites they don't want, and never open these links. But to block those links, do users really have to open a link and return to Google to block it? Also, the sites that have already been blocked with the extension, will they be auto-blocked?

ejdyksen 16y ago
You could also just go here and add manually to your heart's content: http://www.google.com/reviews/t http://www.google.com/reviews/t
MatthewPhillips 16y ago
I think it's to avoid accidental blocks.
jakewalker 16y ago
Agree - - would love to see a Chrome extension that will give me a one-click button to add the domain of the page I'm currently on (presumably after having clicked on it from a Google search) added to my block list.

nswanberg 16y ago

It would be interesting to see the percentage of Google users that that block even one site. Though even if it's a small percentage it could help the blockers take out their search frustrations by blocking a site, and help the non-blockers by giving Google hints as to what searchers don't like. The magical optimization I would prefer would be a non-commercial search. If I search for a piece of gear sometimes I don't want to buy it and instead want to weigh buying it or just look up reference information. For some searches that is tough, and permanently blocking commercial sites isn't an option. (I've occassionally resorted to limiting my searches to .edu and .org domains with limited success). Even temporarily blocking commercial sites might not help, though, since sites like Amazon.com have fantastic reviews on some items.

ShabbyDoo 16y ago
"by giving Google hints as to what searchers don't like." Crowd-sourced curation -- this must be Google's eventual goal for the "blocking" feature. Can't content farms be thought of as spam? And, if so, don't the same techniques for spam identification apply, especially the "mark as spam" button in Gmail? [Conjecture and speculation below as there's no evidence Google is going to modify search results based on users' blocking propensities, but I think the possibilities are worthy of consideration.] I wonder how this scheme could be gamed? Consider how one might game spam filters to cause a target's future mailings to end up marked as spam. To hit a high-volume target, one would have to cause a ton of email addresses under his control to be placed on the senders distribution list. Then, when messages arrived, he would mark them all as spam. Although the total percentage of the sender's mailing list comprised of the bad guy's email addresses might be small, this technique would still be effective because the percentage of "activist" recipients required to flag any sender as a spammer is so low (at least I'm told). To address this problem, Google could certainly apply schemes similar to those used to identify click fraud. Such countermeasures would require the bad guy to make his attack appear more organic. Have there been actual instances of such denial-of-service attacks? With a similar strategy, could, say, an anti-abortion group enlist its membership to banish pro-abortion groups' websites from search results? What if members were instructed to search for phrases like "How to get an abortion" and block Planned Parenthood, etc.? The difference between websites and email lists is that the owner of an email list has direct control and could take countermeasures like changing mail servers, etc. Also, large bulk mailers (MailChimp, etc.) generally have good relationships with large email box providers like Google and can therefore plead their clients' cases directly to a responsible person. How would pro-abortion groups get attention from Google if their site rankings dropped due to such grassroots organizing? Would Google be able to identify this as an orchestrated effort? How would the behavioral patterns of pro/anti-abortion activists be any different than this forum's treatment of Experts Exchange? Google will observe that one small segment of its userbase blocks the site in high numbers but another segment, when searching for the same terms (MySQL failure XYZ) click on Experts Exchange results? Wouldn't users actually seeking information on how to get an abortion recognize the name "Planned Parenthood" and click on those same results which were blocked by activists?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mitjak 16y ago

Quick, block expertsexchange!

mrleinad 16y ago
Regardless of how insanely irritating their site is, I've found my answer there.. about once or twice. But I wouldn't block them entirely..
- ceejayoz 16y ago
  I've found answers there, too, but I've yet to encounter a situation where they're the only place an answer is found. Now that StackOverflow is around I suspect that's even less likely.
- nswanberg 16y ago
  Perhaps Google could introduce an "I'm Feeling Desperate" button for the times you just know your result lies within one of your previously blocked sites.
  - Peaker 16y ago
    You could log out..
- mitjak 16y ago
  My problem usually, contrasting other comments here, is that I don't look at the URL of the link I'm clicking on but primarily at the title. Since a lot of questions on EE are very specific, I often click by accident since the question sounds a lot like what I'm looking to find an answer for, only to grunt at having to scroll all the down ("Ok, I'll give them one more try..") where no answer usually is found.
richbradshaw 16y ago
First thing I did!

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jmillikin 16y ago

Just tried it out with the manual block page at < http://www.google.com/reviews/t http://www.google.com/reviews/t > I notice that when I block a subdomain (eg, http://answers.yahoo.com/ http://answers.yahoo.com/ ) the page actually shows the entire domain (yahoo.com) as blocked. Is this just an error in the display, or does it actually only block based on domain? If the second, this significantly limits the usability, since I can't block < http://someobviouslinkspam.blogspot.com http://someobviouslinkspam.blogspot.com > without also blocking every blogspot.com site.

thisisananth 16y ago
I just observed that for blogs like http://somespam.blogspot.com http://somespam.blogspot.com, it allows you to block somesmap.blogspot.com alone, not the whole blogspot domain. It is the same for wordpress also.
jonursenbach 16y ago
Having the same answers.yahoo.com issue here. Very weird. Edit: Clicking on "show details" it says that answers.yahoo.com is blocked, so maybe they're only showing the base domain here. Still weird.
- jmillikin 16y ago
  Click "Download as text file" -- only yahoo.com is included in the download. Based on the file contents (UNIX line endings), I'm guessing that's a raw-ish dump of the database contents.

dserodio 16y ago

I don't see this button on google.com.br I hope it's propagated to international Google pages soon.

afhof 16y ago

What happens if you block Google?

MatthewPhillips 16y ago
Time-space breaks down. Don't do it! The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if in a few months users are mysteriously going to have facebook.com added to their block list.
- mitjak 16y ago
  That'll just block Facebook from showing up in Google results which they never did in the first place unless you searched for someone's name.
cpeterso 16y ago
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=about:blank" />

ChuckMcM 16y ago

Ah, good to see Google following our lead :-) (Disclaimer I work at Blekko and we've had this feature from launch, and we don't limit you to 500 sites either) On a more serious note though, its nice to see Google validate our assertion, that un-modified Google search results are getting poorer and poorer. Not that they would actually say it directly like that of course. Now lets see if they are willing to drop over a million crappy sites out of their index ...

rsoto 16y ago
I just lost a little of respect from you guys with this comment.
- mistermann 16y ago
  I didn't, I think its true. I'm shocked google actually did this, it will cost them money in advertising dollars, and I honestly thought some of their technical decisions were being driven by maximizing revenue at almost any cost, so this move seems to invalidate that theory. Kudos to google I say.
  - lwat 16y ago
    Losing users will also cost them money in advertising dollars.
    - Andrewski 16y ago
      SEO spam has no actual users bro.
      - lwat 16y ago
        I mean Google. They'll lose users if they don't do something about the SEO spam.
        digitaltothem 16y ago

shimonamit 16y ago

Now, if they could only provide a way to disable previews...

thezilch 16y ago
Click the magnifying glass on any search-return item.

gwern 16y ago

For me, this is frustrating because it's not that useful in general search results, but it would be extremely useful in pruning Custom Search Engine results - and that's exactly where it isn't. I want a one-click way to ban a domain from search engine results because most blacklisted domains in my Wikipedia search engine (http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=009114923999563836576:1eorkzz2gp4 http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=009114923999563836576:1eor...) are porn or filesharing sites. One recognizes such spam in an instant, but it still takes a while to prune down the URL to the right domain, flip to the edit tab, paste it in, flip back, and relocate myself. I'm not kidding when I say such a one-click button would cut by at least half the time I have to put into cleaning up the CSE results for any given query.

bcrescimanno 16y ago

Aside from the "big two" (experts exchange and Mahalo) I actually think the one I'll block first is Wikipedia. Truthfully, I really like Wikipedia as a resource and love to peruse the information there--but if I want the article from Wikipedia, I'll go to Wikipedia and look it up. If I'm searching google, it's probably for something that's not going to be covered well by Wikipedia anyway. For example, let's say someone has suggested to me to use the factory pattern to solve a problem in a project and I'm not intimately familiar with that pattern. I search for "Factory design pattern" on Google and notice that the first 2 results are wikipedia results. There's some good, basic boiler plate--but that's not what I need (Ok, what I really need is probably a trusty copy of the "Gang of Four" so maybe it's a bad--or at least contrived example).

mikexstudios 16y ago
I disagree. Having wikipedia results at the top of my google searches has been extremely useful. It's easier to find a wikipedia page through google rather than search on the wikipedia site.
- bcrescimanno 16y ago
  That's a fair point; though I generally use Google for, "I want something better than the encyclopedia treatment" on a topic.

Limes102 16y ago

I have been waiting for this so I can hide Experts Exchange.

eykanal 16y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I switched to Bing a few weeks ago, and I'm finding a pretty good increase in search result quality. For me, good search by default > good search only with my help. OTOH, I imagine that bing will also eventually succumb to content farms and other techniques that will come up, so maybe this is the way of the future.

geuis 16y ago

Not sure why they are limiting this to particular browser versions. If I'm running IE7 (which I'm not), what does that have to do with which sites I want to block?

tonfa 16y ago
Maybe the way they detect you went back to the search result depends on the modern browser functionality.

gxs 16y ago

You know, maybe I'm just slow and don't see the big picture, but I don't understand what all the hubub is about. The '-' operator has worked wonders for me for years.

rglullis 16y ago
Do you type "-mahalo.com -efreedom.net -allthespamblogsthatannoyme.com", every time you do a search?
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Stormbringer 16y ago
I for one am looking forward to typing a technical question and then not getting hundreds of hits from those sites that want to charge money for the answer. (And to head off the obvious karma steal at the pass - Because sometimes the answer isn't in stackoverflow yet. Duh)

AlexC04 16y ago

As an experiment, I thought I'd block FoxNews from my results to see if it would stop coming up in my "google news" aggregator. Sadly, it does not. Would have been neat though.

cpeterso 16y ago
Google News' Settings allows you to configure "more news from" and "less news from" by publisher. More news from: NPR The Economist Wired News Less news from: FOXNews FOXSports.com Wall Street Journal http://news.google.com/news/settings http://news.google.com/news/settings

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paolomaffei 16y ago

Now I'd only wish people to be able to share lists with friends, just like you download blocking lists from adblock :) But in the meanwhile good riddance Mahalo, eHow, Yahoo Answers and ExpertSExchange, etc

pbiggar 16y ago

Hopefully this will get combined with Google Alerts, so I have a one-click way to tell google that people are creating spam on topics I care about.

bretthellman 16y ago

What's next? Build your own search results

TGJ 16y ago

That's awesome. I'm glad they are giving the users more options. I searched for how to bake a cake to finally block ehow from my results. How good that feels. Trash sites are about to feel the sting I imagine. That reminds me, need to block about.com too.