16 ms·

Show HN: A Firefox add-on to strip Google search results of 'blacklisted' URLs

574 points by davehcker 6y ago

mrtweetyhack 6y ago
webmd
cft 6y ago
Please make one for Bing. I gave up on Google search about half a year ago initially for all searches that could yield politically incorrect results, but then for all technical searches as well due to these spammy sites. Bing technical search is definitely higher quality and the general results are more politically neutral, but it still needs your extension. I currently find Firefox/Bing to be the most effective combination.
- davehcker 6y ago
  I never personally used Bing much (but memes have told me the same about its search quality). I will take into consideration for the next execution. I have been also mildly pissed at Youtube results and given how permeated it is into a 'learner's' life, I have been thinking about Youtube too. But in that case I'll have to take more usability into account to allow for right-click>add_to_blacklist kind of thing since there are so many low-quality ad-loaded channels.
  - tester756 6y ago
    I think Bing is better than Google when it comes to NSFW stuff (friend told me) and probably Image Search
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  I'll second this experience. Bing news has become markedly more curated recently, imo. But it's still miles ahead of Google with respect to treating you like an adult capable of critically engaging with information.
wanderingstan 6y ago
Great work! I actually made something similar 15 years ago with a P2P social networking angle: You could hide/promote results based on your friends' reccomendations. Check out some old screenshots from Firefox version 1.0: http://getoutfoxed.com/screenshots http://getoutfoxed.com/screenshots It went viral on del.icio.us and let to me taking venture funding to found www.lijit.com, which lives on now as http://sovrn.com/ http://sovrn.com/
- davehcker 6y ago
  This is very inspirational! Actually I have something similar in mind- 1. to allow subscribing to friend's or network's lists. and/or 2. Make it a 'window' to your search experience. So it's privacy focused personal/social logic that offers you Google or any search engine that way you prefer. I think PageRank is not enough (or may be too much) for me...
- dewey 6y ago
  This is a really cool idea. I wish something like that would exist as a Pinboard Extension. Where it just decorates your search results with information about if your friends have it bookmarked, your tags or even blacklist domains if tagged as blacklist:domain or something on Pinboard by you or your friends. Would be a nice way to make use of that data.
recrof 6y ago
expert-sex-change.com
dehrmann 6y ago
So long, w3schools.
wellthisisgreat 6y ago
Is there something like this for Chrome?
- davehcker 6y ago
  I'm not aware about other similar tools. But I'll be soon porting and submitting on Chrome as well.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  Though I haven't used it, this seems to do something similar: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
- bubblethink 6y ago
  https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/ https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
altano 6y ago
I would love this but unfortunately this permissions request is too broad: https://files.terriblefish.com/2020-05-24_17-27-15.png https://files.terriblefish.com/2020-05-24_17-27-15.png The Firefox UI won't let me see what the other 195 domains are.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  This sounds like something Firefox should fix.
- aclimatt 6y ago
  They are all localized Google domains. https://github.com/davidahmed/wiper/blob/master/manifest.json https://github.com/davidahmed/wiper/blob/master/manifest.jso... EDIT: Even better, they're also listed right on the extension's page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/ Left side, "Permissions" (click to view all)
  - altano 6y ago
    Perfect, thanks!
nabakin 6y ago
This is a great idea! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it beforehand! I looked through your code and it looks like you replace the HTML of the page. Have you considered appending "-site:<blacklisted url> -site:<blacklisted url>...etc" to the end of the search query instead? This way, the user still gets a full page of relevant search results. I'm not sure how flexible extensions are, but maybe you could intercept all request attempts to google search, append the blacklisted URLs to the search query, then hide them on the loaded page so that the user doesn't have to see the long list of appended, blacklisted URLs.
- davehcker 6y ago
  Thanks. No that has the potential issue of assuming that results from your blacklist are complete crap. That'd be equivalent of removing the search results based on the blacklist entirely (right?). Based on a comment here on HN as well, I think that's not necessarily a good idea. You don't know what you don't know, so may be a blacklisted website may return a valid result (unlikely but probable, so I'm letting that assumption be there). And feel free to contribute on Github if you like :)
  - nabakin 6y ago
    It removes all blacklisted URLs from the search results. Isn't that what your extension does?
    - kmundnic 6y ago
      According to the site on Firefox Add-ons [1], it tells you which websites it is not showing, which I think would not be possible with your suggestion. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/
      - nathcd 6y ago
        Ah, so it's actually not entirely removing blacklisted results, it's just condensing those results. Personally, I think I'd be more interested in nabakin's idea of editing the query before it gets sent to Google. Although - like zargon says in a top-level comment - this clearly should just be built into search engines themselves. The only semi-legitimate reason I can think of that they wouldn't be is that results for a given query would be even less reproducible than they already are from person-to-person. But since Google already "personalizes" results, I don't think that's really a factor for them. They could just have a little button at the bottom that says "3 results from sites you've blacklisted - wanna see them?" or whatever.
blackboxlogic 6y ago
Wow... that was fast: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/gorbw9/featurerequest_userspecific_searchresults/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/gorbw9/featurer...
ciarannolan 6y ago
Sorry to be a pedant here, but I think a title of "Show HN: A Firefox add-on to strip Google search results _of_ 'blacklisted' URLs" is much more clear.
- davehcker 6y ago
  Thanks; I fixed it.
davehcker 6y ago
I wrote this because I was so annoyed by irrelevant low-quality search results for my queries on Google. For instance if I'm looking up for Python xyz topic, 99% of the times I am not interested in some 'low-quality' content (based on my personal preferences) from website example.com. The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
- Causality1 6y ago
  I can't wait until I get home and try this. I am completely sick to death of Google image search results being full of videos. It's impossible to find an actual gif to imbed in an HTML comment post because the results are drowning in videos from Giphy, Tenor, etc. It'll be so delicious to consign them to oblivion. Edit: unfortunately it doesn't work on image search. Oh well.
  - throwaway777555 6y ago
    Seconding this for Tenor. They certainly know how to game Google for traffic, then stop users from getting what they want
- Paperweight 6y ago
  Amazing! Thanks! We need this for YouTube as well, though the blacklist would be extremely large. In fact, I wonder if this could be implemented as a filter list for uBlock Origin?
  - andai 6y ago
    When I log out, YouTube becomes total trash, so I thought the algorithm was really customized to me. Then I visited a friend to watch some movies and saw half our recommendations were identical. Like we got placed in the same "bucket" or something.
    - chipperyman573 6y ago
      I remember reading something that said is how spotify makes discover weekly playlists (but I can't find it now), so I wouldn't be too surprised
fillskills 6y ago
This is absolutely fantastic. Similarly frustrated with sites gaming SEO with near rubbish results or bare minimum content.
wccrawford 6y ago
This should already have been part of Google itself. Some sites come up high far too frequently for certain searches of mine, and it's never the best info. I like that this doesn't completely blow away the result, but I do kind of wish is was further de-emphasized. Maybe smaller font or faded text.
- DrJokepu 6y ago
  This was actually a Google feature maybe about a decade ago. It was removed at some point.
  - riyadparvez 6y ago
    Yes, it was a part of Google search. I guess they removed it because not many people were using it. Too bad I was a big fan of this feature.
    - hdctambien 6y ago
      Or because too many people were using it!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- davehcker 6y ago
  Thanks. I'd sure take those into account in the next iteration. It was my weekend project :)
- marakv2 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure it use to be, I remember searching for something like this years ago and stumbling upon a comment saying it had recently stopped that offering.
CWuestefeld 6y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I don't get what this is doing. How did the Google search results get inside some other URL? I tried to watch the animation to understand, but it's too low resolution for me to read.
- davehcker 6y ago
  It basically lets you create a list of blacklisted URLs and then any Google search results that matches against these URLs is stripped to the bare URL alone. The screenshot on the Firefox Addons page is of a much better quality.
beloch 6y ago
Goodbye Pinterest!
- bobbyz 6y ago
  Goodbye Forbes!
  - jonahhorowitz 6y ago
    Goodbye Amazon!
    - zentiggr 6y ago
      Goodbye Quora, experts-exchamge, and a bazillion random string name sites.
- elitistphoenix 6y ago
  My first thought too!
arkitaip 6y ago
Google search filter is an alternative that has been around for quite some time and has some additional features: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...
- zaat 6y ago
  This does look interesting, but it requires much more permissions and personally I hesitate to grant those for any non-monitored extension.
modzu 6y ago
for those who dont know about native search filters, appending "-domain.tld" to a regular search query also works
- SquareWheel 6y ago
  You can also create a custom browser search command with this. Pass it into your search engine of choice.
- davehcker 6y ago
  "-domain.tld" has the side-effect that it'd not get any results from those domains then; which might not be a good idea (at least in 1% of those cases when say "-domain.tld" might be what exactly you're looking for".
bArray 6y ago
I like the idea, although I personally won't be using it, I really like that it exists. From a "freedom" perspective, I think individuals are free to impose their own filters but generally the default should be unrestricted access. That would possibly be with the caveat of the provably vulnerable (children, mental disabilities, etc). Keep up the good work!
dkthehuman 6y ago
Chrome users: uBlacklist is fantastic. (It also has a Firefox version.) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe/related?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... It's also one of the best extensions I've seen in terms of code quality: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist
- shpx 6y ago
  uBlacklist can also filter results on Duck Duck Go and Startpage (it's in settings if you go to chrome://extensions/ find uBlacklist, click on it, scroll to the bottom and click "Extension options"), but I've never tried it.
  - gxnxcxcx 6y ago
    Confirmed working on DDG (text search only) and Startpage (both text and images), tested on Firefox.
- dfee 6y ago
  Just sampled the code, it really is well written!
- Normille 6y ago
  AS I said in a post above, I've been using TamperMonkey[1] and a userscript[2] to do this. Reading the [virtually non-existent] description of the uBlacklist plugin, it seems to offer the same thing. Now I'm wondering if there's any reason to prefer an extension over a userscript [or vice versa]? [1] https://www.tampermonkey.net/ https://www.tampermonkey.net/ [2] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d... ASIDE: whatever the merits of this particular extension, I think the choice of name is a pretty snidey attempt by the developer to cash in on the popularity of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
rkagerer 6y ago
Any reason you chose to do this as a Firefox plugin rather than a Greasemonkey (or similar) script? Not judging, just wondering.
- davehcker 6y ago
  1. My hatred for Chrome (kind of recent HN influence) led me into Firefox first and foremost hence Firefox. Even though I'll be porting it to Chrom(ium-e) soon. 2. It could be my attitude but I thought writing ground up vanilla would be much easier than learning a new tool, i.e., I know Greasemonkey only as much as in its name and nothing else about its workflow. 2.1 I guess an addon is easier to distribute/install (?).
- zargon 6y ago
  Personally, I have been using byuu's user script for this. I also love it for the click tracking removal and display of the complete url. https://byuu.org/projects/google https://byuu.org/projects/google
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Donkeykong1111 6y ago
It seems kinda ridiculous that such a obvious and extremely useful idea hadn't been made yet, I cant wait to use it! Bravo! Thanks so much or developing this.
adtac 6y ago
you might as well preload this with Pinterest, that is precisely what I and most people will be using this ext for
lukaa 6y ago
I wonder is there extension that would do exactly opposite, only include google results from sites that i choose in order that i want.
- ranadeep 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm looking for something like this too. I would like to have Wikipedia at the top of the results.
- davehcker 6y ago
  Ordering is something that I'm not sure about (but I've myself been thinking about it for a future addon- if not the current one) that would 'weigh' the URLs like .edu/wikipedia etc. much higher. Would such a feature be helpful to you? And as a part of the same addon? As for only results from specific websites, you may use Google Operators (like inurl, site, etc.)
- ImaCake 6y ago
  Well doesn't give order, but "cake site:news.ycombinator.com" will give search for keyword "cake" only on HN.
- wanderingstan 6y ago
  Sounds like Google Custom Search? https://developers.google.com/custom-search https://developers.google.com/custom-search
Donkeykong1111 6y ago
Good bye corporate news from my search results! I am so fed up with a bunch of news articles always crowding out the top results for nearly every search query. No more having to wade though propaganda soup to find the things i want.
- Macuyiko 6y ago
  This extension comes at a good time. Just a couple of weeks ago I was wondering how search would feel if you'd remove all news sites (mainstream and otherwise).
nishnik 6y ago
I created an add-on which replaces !s with inurl:stackoverflow.com to replicate the bangs of duckduckgo in Google.
- chipperyman573 6y ago
  How come not site:stackoverflow.com? Is this just a different way of doing the same thing? I've never heard of the inurl: flag
  - nabakin 6y ago
    inurl filters so that the result URLs must contain the keyword specified. So inurl:w3 would only show results where w3 is in the URL. It works for this use case but it's better to just use site like you mentioned.
    - thejynxed 6y ago
      You can't even fully rely on those operatorsike site: anymore because Google now happily serves you results from miscreants that tag their scam site urls with valid site names, so instead of getting results from only let's say mozilla.org, you also now get them from their scamsite because they appended the actual mozilla site url into their own.
      - nabakin 6y ago
        Are you sure that happens with site and not inurl? That's a big bug. Do you have an example?
zargon 6y ago
This used to be built-in to google itself. You could choose to block a site from future results from any results page. But they killed it, along with forum search, code search, usenet search, and so many other useful things.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  Sounds like those things should be added to the Google graveyard. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- axaxs 6y ago
  Forum search was my absolute favorite part of Google. Is there any good alternative?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hackissimo123 6y ago
  Yes, my first thought upon reading the post was "doesn't Google already offer this?" Didn't realise they'd killed it. I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine these days and I'm actually reasonably happy with it. The results used to be laughably bad but they've really improved lately. Sadly, the one thing where DDG is usually crap is for anything code-related, especially if I'm searching for something very specific like an error message or an obscure library. That's when I have to jump back to Google (well, actually Startpage.)
  - _0ffh 6y ago
    Regarding DDG, I have noticed that recently it has started to suggest a ton of porn, even for totally unrelated searches. As an experiment I just typed in the first thing that came to my mind: "thorn in cat's paw". One of the results is "Cat porn videos", on the very first page! And this is far from the worst case I've encountered...
    - clarry 6y ago
wolco 6y ago
Can it re-add blacklisted URLs? I would pay for that.
- davehcker 6y ago
  Care to elaborate please?
lwkl 6y ago
Thank you! I was searching for an add-on like this a few months ago. When I search for tech support issues I get a lot of SEO spam blogs that have no useful information now I can finally filter them out.
ravenstine 6y ago
Would be nice if there was a DDG version.
- GraemeL 6y ago
  I've been using this userscript since Google dropped the ability to block results years ago. It works across a bunch of search engines. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
  - Normille 6y ago
    Me too. It's been great I've also cobbled together a Tampermonkey script which I wittily call "HackerChoose" which allows me to similarly block domains from appearing on HN. Unfortunately my JS-foo isn't up to making it interactive, so I have to manually update the list of banned domains. But, if anyone's interested, here it is: This actual Tampermonkey stub script imports the full userscript from a location elsewhere on my hard drive. This makes it easier to maintain the list of banned domains by editing that imported file directly, rather than having to make edits from within Tampermonkey's clunky interface: https://pastebin.com/raMSWMDi https://pastebin.com/raMSWMDi This is the imported userscript. I pretty much lifted it from one someone else had made and then twiddled it a bit. So apologies to whoever the original author was, but I've forgotten where I got it, so can't give you the credit: https://pastebin.com/SbtfXEby https://pastebin.com/SbtfXEby
Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
or just a search engine that doesn't you know, censor search results.
pasttense01 6y ago
The number one thing lots of us don't want for general searches are shopping results.
dvduval 6y ago
I would so love to have a search engine setting in which I could remove the top 500 web properties from my search, or have similar parameters to help remove large swaths information that I'm not interested in looking at.
- LiveTheDream 6y ago
  https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ can do this
joshspankit 6y ago
Honestly, at this point Google themselves should be offering this. Not only would it keep people coming back for actually valuable results, but it would feed them with an up-to-the minute listing of sites people don’t trust.
- sneak 6y ago
  Google does offer this, it's just a filter list to benefit Google, and not you.
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    You misunderstand: I’m saying they should be offering a way for users to set their own blacklists.
    - myself248 6y ago
      You misunderstand: You are not Google's customer. You are their product.
- Meekro 6y ago
  Even better, let people subscribe to block lists, like ad blockers do. Instead of putting together my own list of shit sites (which will be perpetually out of date), I'd be happy to outsource that to some group I trust.
  - davehcker 6y ago
    It's an enhancement issue I've already added to the repository on Github. Planning to roll it out in the next update :) Honestly, I didn't know how big of a pain it was to a lot of people until now.
- aendruk 6y ago
  They did! Then of course killed it.
jaimex2 6y ago
Google used to offer this as a feature in search itself ages ago. It ended up being removed from the core product and replaced by an extension which they abandoned. It's currently community maintained: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot-by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
atrudeau 6y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt... Similar, but also enables highlighting of certain domains. Also available on Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filter/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filt...
polymorph1sm 6y ago
Thank you! Just curious, is there any reason why "Wiper blacklisted URL: <URL>" need to be shown instead of a cleaner removal?
- davehcker 6y ago
  You mean why not fully remove the URL? That's just in the odd case you really do want to visit the link (after Google think that it's a good result). May be example.com happens to be the ONLY website that does have some good content, I personally wouldn't want to ban it entirely. But in every case, I'd like to strip their results so I won't have to scroll down to get to the good results.
wyck 6y ago
So basically block 70% of all results from first and second page? Google has turned into a defective product.
Nightshaxx 6y ago
As someone who just graduated college and found geeksforgeeks, cplusplusreference, and w3schools quite helpful for Algorithms, c++ Syntax, and learning some basic web design stuff (respectively).....what should I be using? I see a lot of people hating on them....but they all seemed alright to me. Is it just because they are too basic? (I used a lot of these things for just learning basic things I either forgot the syntax for or needed a quick introduction). I'd especially like to know for c++.
- GeneralMayhem 6y ago
  The complaints about these sites is usually that (a) they're literally wrong just often enough that you don't want to rely on them, which defeats the point of a reference, or (b) they try to "teach" things that are not recommended best practices. With w3schools in particular, there's the added "ick" that they try very hard to make it look like they're an offical W3C source, and sell scammy certifications based on that confusion. They also provided (past tense, because I haven't looked at it in years) some very questionable practices with PHP that would lead to trivially insecure code. cppreference.com is what I usually use for C++. It's well organized, well cross-linked, and uses exact standards language whenever possible. It's also very good about showing the differences between successive versions of the C++ standard libraries, which is invaluable if you're working with any sort of legacy code and wondering why something looks funny. For HTML5/JS, MDN (Mozilla) was my default when I did front-end, but it's been a little while. I'm sure Mozilla is still great, but there might also be something easier to traverse.
  - Nightshaxx 6y ago
    Ahhhh.....you know what, now that I think about it, I remember last semester for a class I had to do a bunch of PHP + SQL for a Backend (my first time really using either). I basically just googled a bunch of stuff and I ended up just writing the queries in as strings basically because that's what I saw on a site (very possibly one of the ones in question). I felt it was wrong because I was concerned about SQL injection, but my professor really didn't care about security so I wasn't too too concerned. Later on my professor mentioned that pre-compiled statements (I think that's what they are called) and I facepalmed because that would have been way more secure and been 5x easier anyways. So yea, I guess they still are giving bad advice.
sabujp 6y ago
i absolutely cannot stand geeksforgeeks.com
mancerayder 6y ago
This might be useful to blacklist some of the shopping results when you want facts and not shopping results. Sometimes I google "how does X work" type questions, and I get pages of links of things I should buy. The top stuff are obvious ads, but the non-ad results are basically shopping sites, too. That's mean of Google. They're our main source of information ("How does X work") and instead they want to redirect you to shopping because .. they can. I notice -shopping helps... magically. But not enough. Maybe the blacklist is the right idea. Can there be a magic incantation to exclude or include groups of blacklisted sites on a whim?
- davehcker 6y ago
  I'll take this into account too towards my attempt in making it more customizable.
ycombonator 6y ago
Geeksforgeeks and tutorialspoint are low quality offshore content farms.
wnevets 6y ago
At one point google had this as a chrome extension and as a built in feature to the search itself. Both are now dead for some reason
pot8n 6y ago
Thank you for this addon. Google should have done this 20 years ago.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
XorNot 6y ago
Don't think I've ever wanted to install an extension so fast. There are so, so many domains that I am content to literally never see in search results...
zebnyc 6y ago
Sorry to hijack this thread but does anyone know of any extension that blocks / strips certain kinds of content. Use case: I am as guilty of mindless browsing as the next person but seeing news / click-bait headlines about certain celebs like the kardashians makes my blood boil.
- colordrops 6y ago
  If I may be frank it sounds like a deeper problem than browsing certain sites. May want to work on impulse control and contemplate why you are driven to these sites in the first place.
- TheCapeGreek 6y ago
  uBlock Origin has custom filters you can use. I'm guilty of the exact same thing (just not the same sites). Here's a sample of what I use: ||youtube.com/|$document,xhr ||youtube.com/?pbj*|$document,xhr The first blocks YT entirely. The second blocks URL loads (if you load the URL directly) AND SPA redirects. I mostly use these to use YT only for content I subscribe to and avoid the algorithms by impulse or accident. Note that not all SPAs work the same, so you'd have to do some digging. For example, 9Gag doesn't redirect from the same API endpoint but instead uses payload data, so it's more difficult to block that. You can still block direct pageloads, but not SPA redirects, so for sites like that you may want to just block the entire domain. I have a small list of content I try to avoid using this, mostly Reddit subs and "main" pages like r/all or r/popular. With this in mind, my ideal YT & reddit feeds are only content I explicitly want to see. Else, I'd recommend a feed curator like Feedly. You can set up custom site feeds and so you'll only see those. I started using it after Firefox killed its RSS. This way there's no algorithm except popularity of a given link from a feed, not what is on the feed at all. So the onus of balance is still on you, but way easier.
llacb47 6y ago
You can also do this with uBlock Origin.
- shbooms 6y ago
  I don't believe you can accomplish precisely what this does with uBO. You can blacklist your browser itself from connecting to certain domains with uBO but you can't fully remove them from within a google search results page since the google results page isn't explicitly connecting to the domains, just displaying links to do so. Even with some advanced cosmetic rules the most you could do is remove the <a> tag fields, not the full title/text of the results.
  - pythux 6y ago
    If you can select the <a> tag, then you can likely use a procedural cosmetic filter to go up the DOM like with :upward(n). So this should be possible.
  - llacb47 6y ago
    No, you can use :has rules to remove the entire result. Edit: or you can use upward().
- Mandatum 6y ago
  This one? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
  - llacb47 6y ago
    No, just regular uBlock Origin, using cosmetic filters.
    - czottmann 6y ago
      This is a damn good idea. Thanks! :)
raister 6y ago
So far, goodbye: pinterest.com forbes.com amazon.co.uk amazon.com pinterest.co.uk ebay.com.au ebay.ca pinterest.at ebay.fr pickclick.co.uk pickclick.fr etsy.com
acrossthepond10 6y ago
would love to have a filter for paywalled articles on google news
justnotworthit 6y ago
Been using https://github.com/wildskyf/personal-blocklist https://github.com/wildskyf/personal-blocklist Got tired of most top results being from different pinterest.xzy domains. And when searching motorcycle prices and specs, I'd always get Indian websites.
andrewash 6y ago
Google has a similar built-in feature today, just add "-" before the domain you don't want to see. For example: html a tag -w3schools.com
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
  Why ignore this site in 2020?
  - Kliment 6y ago
    because mdn exists and is non-scammy
stormdennis 6y ago
answers.microsoft.com I'd blacklist that. Rarely if ever has an actual answer to the question asked in my experience and for some reason comments seem to get duplicated.
Luc 6y ago
Doesn't work in Google Image Search :( Anyone here work at Pinterest?
- epanchin 6y ago
  Blocking Pinterest results in image search was my first thought with this extension. That’s disappointing if it doesn’t, will test myself now.
brainlessdev 6y ago
It looks great. I created an extension with a similar purpose. It adds a confirmation step when you click on blacklisted links, and prepends an angry emoji on blocked text links. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nay/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nay/
myfonj 6y ago
Anybody else here remembers times when Google search supported blocking domains in personal setting? Along with so many advanced search operators? Oh, days of yore… Anyway, you can still use prevailing `site:` operator with "minus" negation (e.g.[1]) , so you can have bookmarked search with your custom blocklist in query [2] [1] no SO and no w3schools example, non-personalized ("verabatim"): https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+merge+arrays+javascript+-site:stackoverflow.com+-site:w3schools.com&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+merge+arrays+javascri... [2] place `%s` into query and set bookmark keyword (Firefox) or chrome://settings/searchEngines - Add: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-site:stackoverflow.com+-site:w3schools.com&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-site:stackoverflow.com+-...
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I'm no expert, but I can imagine that for sites like Google, Twitter, etc, having a blocklist adds a little complexity, but at their scale, a lot of CPU cycles in overhead. I'm pretty simple in my thought processes though, I'm just thinking that they'd need a unique query for every user, assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user?
  - askmike 6y ago
    > assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user? Google search doesn't work like this anymore. Search results for everyone are custom based on what they know about your. For example check out filter bubbles[1]. A blacklist would probably help their models. As for why it got removed we can only guess. I'm guessing it has to do with either bad UX (if you forgot you added domains they will never show up) or them wanting to be in full control of your search experience. [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...
    - skoskie 6y ago
calmchaos 6y ago
Check out also SearchMage - it can filter search results for several search engines and provides some extra functionality as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchmage-search-enhancer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchmage-se... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/searchmage/oldjnhaegfgpfjlpmedeehapghiodglc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/searchmage/oldjnha...
scraft 6y ago
The two issues I have with Google search recent: first, I often get results, when searching for something technical which look like they have huge potential, a sentence with my search terms in, amongst a technical looking paragraph, with a URL, at first glance, that looks good, I click on it and it attempts to take over the browser with spam, redirects etc, I then realize the domain had random characters before the end, but I wonder how such terrible results end up on Google. I want to ban these sites from my searches. Secondly, unrelated to this extension, recently, Google have started popping up a box with other search terms I may be interested in, just after the search loads, within the search results, and the amount of times I have gone to click, only to be last minute intercepted by a link in this box which suddenly appears is unreal. Anyone else get that?
- _puk 6y ago
  To your second point, yes, all the time and it's infuriating. You either need to slow down how you use the search results page, or they appear from nowhere just as you're trying to click the second link. What's worse is I then berate myself mentally as I know that Google has some metric on how many times these suggestions get clicked, and there's some product owner somewhere saying "wow!, x% of users use these suggestions, let's keep this feature!"
- davehcker 6y ago
  Never experienced the latter; but couldn't agree more on the first issue. Actually if you'd not articulated it I'd have thought it was only me. These (farm?) have super awesome titles and content description but then takes to (ph|f)ishy pages. Usually happens to me when I search "[Ebook Title] download". Interestingly of the late I don't see a lot of them after coming to Europe (and see Google mentioning some GDPR compliance related omissions).
jon_black 6y ago
I've been using https://github.com/pistom/hohser https://github.com/pistom/hohser for some time and it works well.
skilled 6y ago
First thing that came to my mind, is this the next-gen ad blocking? Interesting project and I think I am on board with it. Google search results have declined a lot in the last 2 years, mostly because of oversaturation by brands that have been playing the SEO game for years. It's getting increasingly harder to land on pages that have been written by someone without a strict interest in search engine traffic.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
We really should bring back OpenSearch which is/was a way for sites to expose a search URL to browsers (like RSS URLs). You'd then directly query those sites rather than going to the middleman (Google or other search engines). Only that sites exposing OpenSearch URLs probably aren't prepared to be queried by meta crawlers and huge query loads will bring them down rather quickly I guess. The quality of search results on both Google and alternatives is shockingly poor; I can't find documents I used to find only three years ago. I, too, wonder if Google has just lost interest in fighting SEO spam. But I find it hard to believe that they aren't all over their cash cow so I have to conclude they send you to the sites with the most AdWords and Google analytics crap on purpose. At which point Google's search results can be used as a pretty good negative filter I guess ;) Interesting times ahead for search engines.
- myfonj 6y ago
  Site search provided by author seems like the best option on the first glance, but sadly in my experience those in-house full-text searches are most of the times way inferior than simple `site:` limited google search. If not in relevance then in speed -- I think it is understandable, one could hardly compete with Google in this field. Two genuine anecdotal experiences: - MDN search used to be super slow, and to this days its results page is not super nice and still slower than Google: In-site: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=mutationObserver https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=mutationObserve... Google scoped: https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&q=mutationObserver%20site:developer.mozilla.org https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&q=mutationObserver%... - jQuery API docs search felt the same: slow and slightly confusing compared to GSERP. (Much better now with Algolia, but still prefer Google: In-site: https://api.jquery.com/?s=off https://api.jquery.com/?s=off Google scoped: https://www.google.com/search?q=off%20site:api.jquery.com https://www.google.com/search?q=off%20site:api.jquery.com
truebosko 6y ago
I love this! Semi-related, I was just fiddling with a Firefox extension this morning to flip Python 2 documentation results with those of Python 3 (usually also in the results, but lower on the page)
nyolfen 6y ago
i use search keywords for everything, but i have the following custom keyword for google image search (this is firefox, though i believe it works for chrome too if you create one and manually edit it): https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=-pinterest.com+-youtube.com+%s https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=-pinterest.com... it strips out all results from pinterest and youtube thumbnails. though with the lack of direct image links i've been leaning more on ddg and bing these days.
cies 6y ago
good bye w3schools! (MDN is so much better, thanks Mozilla!)
sub7 6y ago
Google search sucks so hard these days. Absurdly shitty. Needs to be unfucked via antitrust IMO they have lost their way.
- ghostpepper 6y ago
  Wouldn't it be better for everyone if a legitimate competitor emerged? It's not like antitrust legislation significantly raised the quality of Microsoft's software in the 90s.
kgwxd 6y ago
I got sick of seeing links to sites I knew I never wanted to visit (or couldn't due to pay/sign-up walls) and accidentally clicking them, so I made something similar to this for myself, but it applies to all sites. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ [1] https://github.com/7w0/ssure https://github.com/7w0/ssure It's terrible to configure because it was only intended for personal use. The only reason it's in the add-on repository at all is the annoying fact you can't reasonably use a locally installed add-on.
djray 6y ago
Coincidentally, I have been working on a similar Chrome/Opera extension. It works for Google, Yahoo!, Bing, DuckDuckGo and a few others, but I haven't finished it or packaged it up to submit to Google yet. Some rough edges and lots of TODOs still. Anyway, it's here if anyone is interested in the code or would like to collaborate: https://github.com/daverayment/SearchHide https://github.com/daverayment/SearchHide

574 points by davehcker 6y ago

webmd

cft 6y ago

Please make one for Bing. I gave up on Google search about half a year ago initially for all searches that could yield politically incorrect results, but then for all technical searches as well due to these spammy sites. Bing technical search is definitely higher quality and the general results are more politically neutral, but it still needs your extension. I currently find Firefox/Bing to be the most effective combination.

davehcker 6y ago
I never personally used Bing much (but memes have told me the same about its search quality). I will take into consideration for the next execution. I have been also mildly pissed at Youtube results and given how permeated it is into a 'learner's' life, I have been thinking about Youtube too. But in that case I'll have to take more usability into account to allow for right-click>add_to_blacklist kind of thing since there are so many low-quality ad-loaded channels.
- tester756 6y ago
  I think Bing is better than Google when it comes to NSFW stuff (friend told me) and probably Image Search
crocodiletears 6y ago
I'll second this experience. Bing news has become markedly more curated recently, imo. But it's still miles ahead of Google with respect to treating you like an adult capable of critically engaging with information.

wanderingstan 6y ago

Great work! I actually made something similar 15 years ago with a P2P social networking angle: You could hide/promote results based on your friends' reccomendations. Check out some old screenshots from Firefox version 1.0: http://getoutfoxed.com/screenshots http://getoutfoxed.com/screenshots It went viral on del.icio.us and let to me taking venture funding to found www.lijit.com, which lives on now as http://sovrn.com/ http://sovrn.com/

davehcker 6y ago
This is very inspirational! Actually I have something similar in mind- 1. to allow subscribing to friend's or network's lists. and/or 2. Make it a 'window' to your search experience. So it's privacy focused personal/social logic that offers you Google or any search engine that way you prefer. I think PageRank is not enough (or may be too much) for me...
dewey 6y ago
This is a really cool idea. I wish something like that would exist as a Pinboard Extension. Where it just decorates your search results with information about if your friends have it bookmarked, your tags or even blacklist domains if tagged as blacklist:domain or something on Pinboard by you or your friends. Would be a nice way to make use of that data.

recrof 6y ago

expert-sex-change.com

dehrmann 6y ago

So long, w3schools.

wellthisisgreat 6y ago

Is there something like this for Chrome?

davehcker 6y ago
I'm not aware about other similar tools. But I'll be soon porting and submitting on Chrome as well.
buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
Though I haven't used it, this seems to do something similar: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
bubblethink 6y ago
https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/ https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

altano 6y ago

I would love this but unfortunately this permissions request is too broad: https://files.terriblefish.com/2020-05-24_17-27-15.png https://files.terriblefish.com/2020-05-24_17-27-15.png The Firefox UI won't let me see what the other 195 domains are.

saagarjha 6y ago
This sounds like something Firefox should fix.
aclimatt 6y ago
They are all localized Google domains. https://github.com/davidahmed/wiper/blob/master/manifest.json https://github.com/davidahmed/wiper/blob/master/manifest.jso... EDIT: Even better, they're also listed right on the extension's page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/ Left side, "Permissions" (click to view all)
- altano 6y ago
  Perfect, thanks!

nabakin 6y ago

This is a great idea! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it beforehand! I looked through your code and it looks like you replace the HTML of the page. Have you considered appending "-site:<blacklisted url> -site:<blacklisted url>...etc" to the end of the search query instead? This way, the user still gets a full page of relevant search results. I'm not sure how flexible extensions are, but maybe you could intercept all request attempts to google search, append the blacklisted URLs to the search query, then hide them on the loaded page so that the user doesn't have to see the long list of appended, blacklisted URLs.

davehcker 6y ago
Thanks. No that has the potential issue of assuming that results from your blacklist are complete crap. That'd be equivalent of removing the search results based on the blacklist entirely (right?). Based on a comment here on HN as well, I think that's not necessarily a good idea. You don't know what you don't know, so may be a blacklisted website may return a valid result (unlikely but probable, so I'm letting that assumption be there). And feel free to contribute on Github if you like :)
- nabakin 6y ago
  It removes all blacklisted URLs from the search results. Isn't that what your extension does?
  - kmundnic 6y ago
    According to the site on Firefox Add-ons [1], it tells you which websites it is not showing, which I think would not be possible with your suggestion. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/
    - nathcd 6y ago
      Ah, so it's actually not entirely removing blacklisted results, it's just condensing those results. Personally, I think I'd be more interested in nabakin's idea of editing the query before it gets sent to Google. Although - like zargon says in a top-level comment - this clearly should just be built into search engines themselves. The only semi-legitimate reason I can think of that they wouldn't be is that results for a given query would be even less reproducible than they already are from person-to-person. But since Google already "personalizes" results, I don't think that's really a factor for them. They could just have a little button at the bottom that says "3 results from sites you've blacklisted - wanna see them?" or whatever.

blackboxlogic 6y ago

Wow... that was fast: https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/gorbw9/featurerequest_userspecific_searchresults/ https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/gorbw9/featurer...

ciarannolan 6y ago

Sorry to be a pedant here, but I think a title of "Show HN: A Firefox add-on to strip Google search results _of_ 'blacklisted' URLs" is much more clear.

davehcker 6y ago
Thanks; I fixed it.

davehcker 6y ago

I wrote this because I was so annoyed by irrelevant low-quality search results for my queries on Google. For instance if I'm looking up for Python xyz topic, 99% of the times I am not interested in some 'low-quality' content (based on my personal preferences) from website example.com. The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.

Causality1 6y ago
I can't wait until I get home and try this. I am completely sick to death of Google image search results being full of videos. It's impossible to find an actual gif to imbed in an HTML comment post because the results are drowning in videos from Giphy, Tenor, etc. It'll be so delicious to consign them to oblivion. Edit: unfortunately it doesn't work on image search. Oh well.
- throwaway777555 6y ago
  Seconding this for Tenor. They certainly know how to game Google for traffic, then stop users from getting what they want
Paperweight 6y ago
Amazing! Thanks! We need this for YouTube as well, though the blacklist would be extremely large. In fact, I wonder if this could be implemented as a filter list for uBlock Origin?
- andai 6y ago
  When I log out, YouTube becomes total trash, so I thought the algorithm was really customized to me. Then I visited a friend to watch some movies and saw half our recommendations were identical. Like we got placed in the same "bucket" or something.
  - chipperyman573 6y ago
    I remember reading something that said is how spotify makes discover weekly playlists (but I can't find it now), so I wouldn't be too surprised

fillskills 6y ago

This is absolutely fantastic. Similarly frustrated with sites gaming SEO with near rubbish results or bare minimum content.

wccrawford 6y ago

This should already have been part of Google itself. Some sites come up high far too frequently for certain searches of mine, and it's never the best info. I like that this doesn't completely blow away the result, but I do kind of wish is was further de-emphasized. Maybe smaller font or faded text.

DrJokepu 6y ago
This was actually a Google feature maybe about a decade ago. It was removed at some point.
- riyadparvez 6y ago
  Yes, it was a part of Google search. I guess they removed it because not many people were using it. Too bad I was a big fan of this feature.
  - hdctambien 6y ago
    Or because too many people were using it!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
davehcker 6y ago
Thanks. I'd sure take those into account in the next iteration. It was my weekend project :)
marakv2 6y ago
I'm pretty sure it use to be, I remember searching for something like this years ago and stumbling upon a comment saying it had recently stopped that offering.

CWuestefeld 6y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I don't get what this is doing. How did the Google search results get inside some other URL? I tried to watch the animation to understand, but it's too low resolution for me to read.

davehcker 6y ago
It basically lets you create a list of blacklisted URLs and then any Google search results that matches against these URLs is stripped to the bare URL alone. The screenshot on the Firefox Addons page is of a much better quality.

beloch 6y ago

Goodbye Pinterest!

bobbyz 6y ago
Goodbye Forbes!
- jonahhorowitz 6y ago
  Goodbye Amazon!
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Goodbye Quora, experts-exchamge, and a bazillion random string name sites.
elitistphoenix 6y ago
My first thought too!

arkitaip 6y ago

Google search filter is an alternative that has been around for quite some time and has some additional features: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt...

zaat 6y ago
This does look interesting, but it requires much more permissions and personally I hesitate to grant those for any non-monitored extension.

modzu 6y ago

for those who dont know about native search filters, appending "-domain.tld" to a regular search query also works

SquareWheel 6y ago
You can also create a custom browser search command with this. Pass it into your search engine of choice.
davehcker 6y ago
"-domain.tld" has the side-effect that it'd not get any results from those domains then; which might not be a good idea (at least in 1% of those cases when say "-domain.tld" might be what exactly you're looking for".

bArray 6y ago

I like the idea, although I personally won't be using it, I really like that it exists. From a "freedom" perspective, I think individuals are free to impose their own filters but generally the default should be unrestricted access. That would possibly be with the caveat of the provably vulnerable (children, mental disabilities, etc). Keep up the good work!

dkthehuman 6y ago

Chrome users: uBlacklist is fantastic. (It also has a Firefox version.) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe/related?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... It's also one of the best extensions I've seen in terms of code quality: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist

shpx 6y ago
uBlacklist can also filter results on Duck Duck Go and Startpage (it's in settings if you go to chrome://extensions/ find uBlacklist, click on it, scroll to the bottom and click "Extension options"), but I've never tried it.
- gxnxcxcx 6y ago
  Confirmed working on DDG (text search only) and Startpage (both text and images), tested on Firefox.
dfee 6y ago
Just sampled the code, it really is well written!
Normille 6y ago
AS I said in a post above, I've been using TamperMonkey[1] and a userscript[2] to do this. Reading the [virtually non-existent] description of the uBlacklist plugin, it seems to offer the same thing. Now I'm wondering if there's any reason to prefer an extension over a userscript [or vice versa]? [1] https://www.tampermonkey.net/ https://www.tampermonkey.net/ [2] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d... ASIDE: whatever the merits of this particular extension, I think the choice of name is a pretty snidey attempt by the developer to cash in on the popularity of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.

rkagerer 6y ago

Any reason you chose to do this as a Firefox plugin rather than a Greasemonkey (or similar) script? Not judging, just wondering.

davehcker 6y ago
1. My hatred for Chrome (kind of recent HN influence) led me into Firefox first and foremost hence Firefox. Even though I'll be porting it to Chrom(ium-e) soon. 2. It could be my attitude but I thought writing ground up vanilla would be much easier than learning a new tool, i.e., I know Greasemonkey only as much as in its name and nothing else about its workflow. 2.1 I guess an addon is easier to distribute/install (?).
zargon 6y ago
Personally, I have been using byuu's user script for this. I also love it for the click tracking removal and display of the complete url. https://byuu.org/projects/google https://byuu.org/projects/google

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Donkeykong1111 6y ago

It seems kinda ridiculous that such a obvious and extremely useful idea hadn't been made yet, I cant wait to use it! Bravo! Thanks so much or developing this.

adtac 6y ago

you might as well preload this with Pinterest, that is precisely what I and most people will be using this ext for

lukaa 6y ago

I wonder is there extension that would do exactly opposite, only include google results from sites that i choose in order that i want.

ranadeep 6y ago
Yeah, I'm looking for something like this too. I would like to have Wikipedia at the top of the results.
davehcker 6y ago
Ordering is something that I'm not sure about (but I've myself been thinking about it for a future addon- if not the current one) that would 'weigh' the URLs like .edu/wikipedia etc. much higher. Would such a feature be helpful to you? And as a part of the same addon? As for only results from specific websites, you may use Google Operators (like inurl, site, etc.)
ImaCake 6y ago
Well doesn't give order, but "cake site:news.ycombinator.com" will give search for keyword "cake" only on HN.
wanderingstan 6y ago
Sounds like Google Custom Search? https://developers.google.com/custom-search https://developers.google.com/custom-search

Donkeykong1111 6y ago

Good bye corporate news from my search results! I am so fed up with a bunch of news articles always crowding out the top results for nearly every search query. No more having to wade though propaganda soup to find the things i want.

Macuyiko 6y ago
This extension comes at a good time. Just a couple of weeks ago I was wondering how search would feel if you'd remove all news sites (mainstream and otherwise).

nishnik 6y ago

I created an add-on which replaces !s with inurl:stackoverflow.com to replicate the bangs of duckduckgo in Google.

chipperyman573 6y ago
How come not site:stackoverflow.com? Is this just a different way of doing the same thing? I've never heard of the inurl: flag
- nabakin 6y ago
  inurl filters so that the result URLs must contain the keyword specified. So inurl:w3 would only show results where w3 is in the URL. It works for this use case but it's better to just use site like you mentioned.
  - thejynxed 6y ago
    You can't even fully rely on those operatorsike site: anymore because Google now happily serves you results from miscreants that tag their scam site urls with valid site names, so instead of getting results from only let's say mozilla.org, you also now get them from their scamsite because they appended the actual mozilla site url into their own.
    - nabakin 6y ago
      Are you sure that happens with site and not inurl? That's a big bug. Do you have an example?

zargon 6y ago

This used to be built-in to google itself. You could choose to block a site from future results from any results page. But they killed it, along with forum search, code search, usenet search, and so many other useful things.

ravenstine 6y ago
Sounds like those things should be added to the Google graveyard. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
axaxs 6y ago
Forum search was my absolute favorite part of Google. Is there any good alternative?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hackissimo123 6y ago
Yes, my first thought upon reading the post was "doesn't Google already offer this?" Didn't realise they'd killed it. I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine these days and I'm actually reasonably happy with it. The results used to be laughably bad but they've really improved lately. Sadly, the one thing where DDG is usually crap is for anything code-related, especially if I'm searching for something very specific like an error message or an obscure library. That's when I have to jump back to Google (well, actually Startpage.)
- _0ffh 6y ago
  Regarding DDG, I have noticed that recently it has started to suggest a ton of porn, even for totally unrelated searches. As an experiment I just typed in the first thing that came to my mind: "thorn in cat's paw". One of the results is "Cat porn videos", on the very first page! And this is far from the worst case I've encountered...
  - clarry 6y ago

wolco 6y ago

Can it re-add blacklisted URLs? I would pay for that.

davehcker 6y ago
Care to elaborate please?

lwkl 6y ago

Thank you! I was searching for an add-on like this a few months ago. When I search for tech support issues I get a lot of SEO spam blogs that have no useful information now I can finally filter them out.

ravenstine 6y ago

Would be nice if there was a DDG version.

GraemeL 6y ago
I've been using this userscript since Google dropped the ability to block results years ago. It works across a bunch of search engines. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
- Normille 6y ago
  Me too. It's been great I've also cobbled together a Tampermonkey script which I wittily call "HackerChoose" which allows me to similarly block domains from appearing on HN. Unfortunately my JS-foo isn't up to making it interactive, so I have to manually update the list of banned domains. But, if anyone's interested, here it is: This actual Tampermonkey stub script imports the full userscript from a location elsewhere on my hard drive. This makes it easier to maintain the list of banned domains by editing that imported file directly, rather than having to make edits from within Tampermonkey's clunky interface: https://pastebin.com/raMSWMDi https://pastebin.com/raMSWMDi This is the imported userscript. I pretty much lifted it from one someone else had made and then twiddled it a bit. So apologies to whoever the original author was, but I've forgotten where I got it, so can't give you the credit: https://pastebin.com/SbtfXEby https://pastebin.com/SbtfXEby

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago

or just a search engine that doesn't you know, censor search results.

pasttense01 6y ago

The number one thing lots of us don't want for general searches are shopping results.

dvduval 6y ago

I would so love to have a search engine setting in which I could remove the top 500 web properties from my search, or have similar parameters to help remove large swaths information that I'm not interested in looking at.

LiveTheDream 6y ago
https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ can do this

joshspankit 6y ago

Honestly, at this point Google themselves should be offering this. Not only would it keep people coming back for actually valuable results, but it would feed them with an up-to-the minute listing of sites people don’t trust.

sneak 6y ago
Google does offer this, it's just a filter list to benefit Google, and not you.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  You misunderstand: I’m saying they should be offering a way for users to set their own blacklists.
  - myself248 6y ago
    You misunderstand: You are not Google's customer. You are their product.
Meekro 6y ago
Even better, let people subscribe to block lists, like ad blockers do. Instead of putting together my own list of shit sites (which will be perpetually out of date), I'd be happy to outsource that to some group I trust.
- davehcker 6y ago
  It's an enhancement issue I've already added to the repository on Github. Planning to roll it out in the next update :) Honestly, I didn't know how big of a pain it was to a lot of people until now.
aendruk 6y ago
They did! Then of course killed it.

jaimex2 6y ago

Google used to offer this as a feature in search itself ages ago. It ended up being removed from the core product and replaced by an extension which they abandoned. It's currently community maintained: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot-by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

atrudeau 6y ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filt... Similar, but also enables highlighting of certain domains. Also available on Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filter/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-filt...

polymorph1sm 6y ago

Thank you! Just curious, is there any reason why "Wiper blacklisted URL: <URL>" need to be shown instead of a cleaner removal?

davehcker 6y ago
You mean why not fully remove the URL? That's just in the odd case you really do want to visit the link (after Google think that it's a good result). May be example.com happens to be the ONLY website that does have some good content, I personally wouldn't want to ban it entirely. But in every case, I'd like to strip their results so I won't have to scroll down to get to the good results.

wyck 6y ago

So basically block 70% of all results from first and second page? Google has turned into a defective product.

Nightshaxx 6y ago

As someone who just graduated college and found geeksforgeeks, cplusplusreference, and w3schools quite helpful for Algorithms, c++ Syntax, and learning some basic web design stuff (respectively).....what should I be using? I see a lot of people hating on them....but they all seemed alright to me. Is it just because they are too basic? (I used a lot of these things for just learning basic things I either forgot the syntax for or needed a quick introduction). I'd especially like to know for c++.

GeneralMayhem 6y ago
The complaints about these sites is usually that (a) they're literally wrong just often enough that you don't want to rely on them, which defeats the point of a reference, or (b) they try to "teach" things that are not recommended best practices. With w3schools in particular, there's the added "ick" that they try very hard to make it look like they're an offical W3C source, and sell scammy certifications based on that confusion. They also provided (past tense, because I haven't looked at it in years) some very questionable practices with PHP that would lead to trivially insecure code. cppreference.com is what I usually use for C++. It's well organized, well cross-linked, and uses exact standards language whenever possible. It's also very good about showing the differences between successive versions of the C++ standard libraries, which is invaluable if you're working with any sort of legacy code and wondering why something looks funny. For HTML5/JS, MDN (Mozilla) was my default when I did front-end, but it's been a little while. I'm sure Mozilla is still great, but there might also be something easier to traverse.
- Nightshaxx 6y ago
  Ahhhh.....you know what, now that I think about it, I remember last semester for a class I had to do a bunch of PHP + SQL for a Backend (my first time really using either). I basically just googled a bunch of stuff and I ended up just writing the queries in as strings basically because that's what I saw on a site (very possibly one of the ones in question). I felt it was wrong because I was concerned about SQL injection, but my professor really didn't care about security so I wasn't too too concerned. Later on my professor mentioned that pre-compiled statements (I think that's what they are called) and I facepalmed because that would have been way more secure and been 5x easier anyways. So yea, I guess they still are giving bad advice.

sabujp 6y ago

i absolutely cannot stand geeksforgeeks.com

mancerayder 6y ago

This might be useful to blacklist some of the shopping results when you want facts and not shopping results. Sometimes I google "how does X work" type questions, and I get pages of links of things I should buy. The top stuff are obvious ads, but the non-ad results are basically shopping sites, too. That's mean of Google. They're our main source of information ("How does X work") and instead they want to redirect you to shopping because .. they can. I notice -shopping helps... magically. But not enough. Maybe the blacklist is the right idea. Can there be a magic incantation to exclude or include groups of blacklisted sites on a whim?

davehcker 6y ago
I'll take this into account too towards my attempt in making it more customizable.

ycombonator 6y ago

Geeksforgeeks and tutorialspoint are low quality offshore content farms.

wnevets 6y ago

At one point google had this as a chrome extension and as a built in feature to the search itself. Both are now dead for some reason

pot8n 6y ago

Thank you for this addon. Google should have done this 20 years ago.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

XorNot 6y ago

Don't think I've ever wanted to install an extension so fast. There are so, so many domains that I am content to literally never see in search results...

zebnyc 6y ago

Sorry to hijack this thread but does anyone know of any extension that blocks / strips certain kinds of content. Use case: I am as guilty of mindless browsing as the next person but seeing news / click-bait headlines about certain celebs like the kardashians makes my blood boil.

colordrops 6y ago
If I may be frank it sounds like a deeper problem than browsing certain sites. May want to work on impulse control and contemplate why you are driven to these sites in the first place.
TheCapeGreek 6y ago
uBlock Origin has custom filters you can use. I'm guilty of the exact same thing (just not the same sites). Here's a sample of what I use: ||youtube.com/|$document,xhr ||youtube.com/?pbj*|$document,xhr The first blocks YT entirely. The second blocks URL loads (if you load the URL directly) AND SPA redirects. I mostly use these to use YT only for content I subscribe to and avoid the algorithms by impulse or accident. Note that not all SPAs work the same, so you'd have to do some digging. For example, 9Gag doesn't redirect from the same API endpoint but instead uses payload data, so it's more difficult to block that. You can still block direct pageloads, but not SPA redirects, so for sites like that you may want to just block the entire domain. I have a small list of content I try to avoid using this, mostly Reddit subs and "main" pages like r/all or r/popular. With this in mind, my ideal YT & reddit feeds are only content I explicitly want to see. Else, I'd recommend a feed curator like Feedly. You can set up custom site feeds and so you'll only see those. I started using it after Firefox killed its RSS. This way there's no algorithm except popularity of a given link from a feed, not what is on the feed at all. So the onus of balance is still on you, but way easier.

llacb47 6y ago

You can also do this with uBlock Origin.

shbooms 6y ago
I don't believe you can accomplish precisely what this does with uBO. You can blacklist your browser itself from connecting to certain domains with uBO but you can't fully remove them from within a google search results page since the google results page isn't explicitly connecting to the domains, just displaying links to do so. Even with some advanced cosmetic rules the most you could do is remove the <a> tag fields, not the full title/text of the results.
- pythux 6y ago
  If you can select the <a> tag, then you can likely use a procedural cosmetic filter to go up the DOM like with :upward(n). So this should be possible.
- llacb47 6y ago
  No, you can use :has rules to remove the entire result. Edit: or you can use upward().
Mandatum 6y ago
This one? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
- llacb47 6y ago
  No, just regular uBlock Origin, using cosmetic filters.
  - czottmann 6y ago
    This is a damn good idea. Thanks! :)

raister 6y ago

So far, goodbye: pinterest.com forbes.com amazon.co.uk amazon.com pinterest.co.uk ebay.com.au ebay.ca pinterest.at ebay.fr pickclick.co.uk pickclick.fr etsy.com

acrossthepond10 6y ago

would love to have a filter for paywalled articles on google news

justnotworthit 6y ago

Been using https://github.com/wildskyf/personal-blocklist https://github.com/wildskyf/personal-blocklist Got tired of most top results being from different pinterest.xzy domains. And when searching motorcycle prices and specs, I'd always get Indian websites.

andrewash 6y ago

Google has a similar built-in feature today, just add "-" before the domain you don't want to see. For example: html a tag -w3schools.com

gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
Why ignore this site in 2020?
- Kliment 6y ago
  because mdn exists and is non-scammy

stormdennis 6y ago

answers.microsoft.com I'd blacklist that. Rarely if ever has an actual answer to the question asked in my experience and for some reason comments seem to get duplicated.

Luc 6y ago

Doesn't work in Google Image Search :( Anyone here work at Pinterest?

epanchin 6y ago
Blocking Pinterest results in image search was my first thought with this extension. That’s disappointing if it doesn’t, will test myself now.

brainlessdev 6y ago

It looks great. I created an extension with a similar purpose. It adds a confirmation step when you click on blacklisted links, and prepends an angry emoji on blocked text links. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nay/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nay/

myfonj 6y ago

Anybody else here remembers times when Google search supported blocking domains in personal setting? Along with so many advanced search operators? Oh, days of yore… Anyway, you can still use prevailing `site:` operator with "minus" negation (e.g.[1]) , so you can have bookmarked search with your custom blocklist in query [2] [1] no SO and no w3schools example, non-personalized ("verabatim"): https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+merge+arrays+javascript+-site:stackoverflow.com+-site:w3schools.com&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+merge+arrays+javascri... [2] place `%s` into query and set bookmark keyword (Firefox) or chrome://settings/searchEngines - Add: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-site:stackoverflow.com+-site:w3schools.com&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-site:stackoverflow.com+-...

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I'm no expert, but I can imagine that for sites like Google, Twitter, etc, having a blocklist adds a little complexity, but at their scale, a lot of CPU cycles in overhead. I'm pretty simple in my thought processes though, I'm just thinking that they'd need a unique query for every user, assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user?
- askmike 6y ago
  > assuming a plain database (works as a mental model). In practice I guess there's one dataset which gets filtered out on its way through the network of servers to the user? Google search doesn't work like this anymore. Search results for everyone are custom based on what they know about your. For example check out filter bubbles[1]. A blacklist would probably help their models. As for why it got removed we can only guess. I'm guessing it has to do with either bad UX (if you forgot you added domains they will never show up) or them wanting to be in full control of your search experience. [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...
  - skoskie 6y ago

calmchaos 6y ago

Check out also SearchMage - it can filter search results for several search engines and provides some extra functionality as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchmage-search-enhancer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchmage-se... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/searchmage/oldjnhaegfgpfjlpmedeehapghiodglc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/searchmage/oldjnha...

scraft 6y ago

The two issues I have with Google search recent: first, I often get results, when searching for something technical which look like they have huge potential, a sentence with my search terms in, amongst a technical looking paragraph, with a URL, at first glance, that looks good, I click on it and it attempts to take over the browser with spam, redirects etc, I then realize the domain had random characters before the end, but I wonder how such terrible results end up on Google. I want to ban these sites from my searches. Secondly, unrelated to this extension, recently, Google have started popping up a box with other search terms I may be interested in, just after the search loads, within the search results, and the amount of times I have gone to click, only to be last minute intercepted by a link in this box which suddenly appears is unreal. Anyone else get that?

_puk 6y ago
To your second point, yes, all the time and it's infuriating. You either need to slow down how you use the search results page, or they appear from nowhere just as you're trying to click the second link. What's worse is I then berate myself mentally as I know that Google has some metric on how many times these suggestions get clicked, and there's some product owner somewhere saying "wow!, x% of users use these suggestions, let's keep this feature!"
davehcker 6y ago
Never experienced the latter; but couldn't agree more on the first issue. Actually if you'd not articulated it I'd have thought it was only me. These (farm?) have super awesome titles and content description but then takes to (ph|f)ishy pages. Usually happens to me when I search "[Ebook Title] download". Interestingly of the late I don't see a lot of them after coming to Europe (and see Google mentioning some GDPR compliance related omissions).

jon_black 6y ago

I've been using https://github.com/pistom/hohser https://github.com/pistom/hohser for some time and it works well.

skilled 6y ago

First thing that came to my mind, is this the next-gen ad blocking? Interesting project and I think I am on board with it. Google search results have declined a lot in the last 2 years, mostly because of oversaturation by brands that have been playing the SEO game for years. It's getting increasingly harder to land on pages that have been written by someone without a strict interest in search engine traffic.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

We really should bring back OpenSearch which is/was a way for sites to expose a search URL to browsers (like RSS URLs). You'd then directly query those sites rather than going to the middleman (Google or other search engines). Only that sites exposing OpenSearch URLs probably aren't prepared to be queried by meta crawlers and huge query loads will bring them down rather quickly I guess. The quality of search results on both Google and alternatives is shockingly poor; I can't find documents I used to find only three years ago. I, too, wonder if Google has just lost interest in fighting SEO spam. But I find it hard to believe that they aren't all over their cash cow so I have to conclude they send you to the sites with the most AdWords and Google analytics crap on purpose. At which point Google's search results can be used as a pretty good negative filter I guess ;) Interesting times ahead for search engines.

myfonj 6y ago
Site search provided by author seems like the best option on the first glance, but sadly in my experience those in-house full-text searches are most of the times way inferior than simple `site:` limited google search. If not in relevance then in speed -- I think it is understandable, one could hardly compete with Google in this field. Two genuine anecdotal experiences: - MDN search used to be super slow, and to this days its results page is not super nice and still slower than Google: In-site: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=mutationObserver https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=mutationObserve... Google scoped: https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&q=mutationObserver%20site:developer.mozilla.org https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&q=mutationObserver%... - jQuery API docs search felt the same: slow and slightly confusing compared to GSERP. (Much better now with Algolia, but still prefer Google: In-site: https://api.jquery.com/?s=off https://api.jquery.com/?s=off Google scoped: https://www.google.com/search?q=off%20site:api.jquery.com https://www.google.com/search?q=off%20site:api.jquery.com

truebosko 6y ago

I love this! Semi-related, I was just fiddling with a Firefox extension this morning to flip Python 2 documentation results with those of Python 3 (usually also in the results, but lower on the page)

nyolfen 6y ago

i use search keywords for everything, but i have the following custom keyword for google image search (this is firefox, though i believe it works for chrome too if you create one and manually edit it): https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=-pinterest.com+-youtube.com+%s https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=-pinterest.com... it strips out all results from pinterest and youtube thumbnails. though with the lack of direct image links i've been leaning more on ddg and bing these days.

cies 6y ago

good bye w3schools! (MDN is so much better, thanks Mozilla!)

sub7 6y ago

Google search sucks so hard these days. Absurdly shitty. Needs to be unfucked via antitrust IMO they have lost their way.

ghostpepper 6y ago
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if a legitimate competitor emerged? It's not like antitrust legislation significantly raised the quality of Microsoft's software in the 90s.

kgwxd 6y ago

I got sick of seeing links to sites I knew I never wanted to visit (or couldn't due to pay/sign-up walls) and accidentally clicking them, so I made something similar to this for myself, but it applies to all sites. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ [1] https://github.com/7w0/ssure https://github.com/7w0/ssure It's terrible to configure because it was only intended for personal use. The only reason it's in the add-on repository at all is the annoying fact you can't reasonably use a locally installed add-on.

djray 6y ago

Coincidentally, I have been working on a similar Chrome/Opera extension. It works for Google, Yahoo!, Bing, DuckDuckGo and a few others, but I haven't finished it or packaged it up to submit to Google yet. Some rough edges and lots of TODOs still. Anyway, it's here if anyone is interested in the code or would like to collaborate: https://github.com/daverayment/SearchHide https://github.com/daverayment/SearchHide