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uBlacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results
- Animats 5y agoWill Google kick that out of the Chrome store?
- oefrha 5y agoGoogle literally had an official Chrome extension called “Personal Blocklist (by Google)” serving this purpose in the past.
- hda2 5y agohad? What happened to it?
- Aissen 5y agoGoogle used it to detect the SEO spammers, improve the algorithm for a while, and now it seems that spammers have found a way around that again because in the mean time maintaining it wasn't worth it inside Google.
- oefrha 5y agoIt broke, then eventually got delisted. Presumably the person working on it left and no one cares to work on something that clearly won’t lead to promotions? There’s a “Personal Blocklist (not by Google)” now.
- temporryname123 5y agoIs that name a bit racist?
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoOh yeah! Adding pinterest to the list now!
- philistine 5y agoThis is such a great idea, and a mystery as to why no search engine has dared to put it on their engine. Care to enlighten me?
- Waterluvian 5y agoIt hurts Google to allow the product to choose what customers have access to it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoTo add to this... A lot of those super annoying ad-filled websites you get directed to from Google Search... Guess who's providing those ads and making money when you accidentally click an ad while trying to get off the website?
- bigmattystyles 5y agoExtend this to map search - If only I could exclude all starbucks, 7/11, even Denny's from my map searches for 'coffee shop'. No hate to those who like the coffee from there, but I want a proper coffee shop and if I could filter out certain chains, I would do it in a caffeinated heartbeat. This applies to not just Google maps though.
- readflaggedcomm 5y agoAt least you can -exclude those names. Gas station convenience stores come up for "grocery store" searches, yet they're all named differently.
- varenc 5y agoGoogle maps doesn't seem to support `-exclude` like Google/DDG search does.
- krono 5y agoFor a quick and dirty DIY solution, add something like this to your uBlock filter list: google.*##.g:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"]) duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"]) The linked project goes way beyond this though, very neat!
- BlameKaneda 5y agoThank you Sir/Ma'am.
- daveoc64 5y agoThanks for the tip. That works well enough for me, and it saves having another browser extension to configure!
- kelnos 5y ago> it saves having another browser extension to configure! Not just that, it saves having another browser extension to trust. A large number of the sites I get to are through search results. A malicious extension that has access to modify search results could do a lot of damage. Hell, I know people who get to their bank and other sensitive sites by typing the name of the institution into Google, rather than typing the URL. Being able to modify search results would be great for phishing.
- sodality2 5y agoThis is why I always do banking/TDAM in Firefox safe mode. I'd rather be tracked (or even hacked by some malicious script through the bank's fault) by my bank, than hacked by an extension I installed, because I wouldn't have much liability in the former but I would in the prior.
- whatshisface 5y agoYou think they're going to accept liability just because it's their fault? In order to get that far they'd have to investigate and then find themselves at fault.
- silisili 5y agoI like the idea, but does it come with a default list? I'd be interested in something like this but that includes most known blogspam sites, with a global list like say pihole provides.
- dkdk8283 5y agoAre you referring to default black list?
- silisili 5y agoKinda - not necessarily on/blocked by default, but a curated, maintained global list available to use, if that makes sense.
- rightbyte 5y agoMy feeling is that by blacklisting like 100 sites you get 99% of the SEO spam. In practice it should be a winning battle, since it takes time and money to spam site up in ranking and low effort to blacklist it. I will try this out.
- visarga 5y agoSo you're saying Google could clean up the index by simply banning 100 sites?
- InvertedRhodium 5y agoI don't think it works at the provider level - one person's junk is another person's treasure, and there's always going to be content that could swing one way or the other.
- rightbyte 5y agoFor my typical querries atleast. I haven't tried yet.
- 5y ago
- Naac 5y agoCan the title be changed to: Ublacklist - Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoChanged now. Thanks! Submitted title was "Ublacklist – the missing button on Google search, IMO". Submitters: please don't do that. It's against the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- potatosalad1 5y agoRecently installed this because I'm learning React and there are so many awful results in the first page of Google search for anything related to React. Many sites that are actually scraped from Stack overflow with no reference to the original post, or Medium posts that are paywalled. Bye bye.
- pbreit 5y agoToo late to change name to "ublocklist"?
- Gigachad 5y agoWhy would they do that? The extension implements blacklisting domains.
- dgemm 5y agoPart of an industry wide effort to replace the term "blacklist" due to connotations.
- dymk 5y agoGitHub and some other big companies put effort into this, but other than that, it’s a pet project for people with too much time on their hands. Give it a few years and nobody will remember what the big deal was.
- badsoftware 5y agoI believe this is also a cultural/political effort to create problems where they don’t exist.
- rightly 5y agoI am part of an industry wide efforts to add more of this term.
- beervirus 5y ago^^^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdxQnOgtzBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdxQnOgtzBI
- greenyoda 5y ago"ublocklist" could easily get confused with "uBlock origin", a very widely used browser extension. Even "Ublacklist" could give the misleading impression that it's somehow related to uBlock or uMatrix.
- Steko 5y agoPersonal Blocklist is another option on Firefox
- shadyr 5y agoFirst usecase I can think of is blacklisting those code example websites which are polluting Google searches.
- bobsmooth 5y agoI guess this is useful if you want to filter a number of sites from your results. -site:example.com still works.
- reyqn 5y agoYeah it seems smarter to ask a result without the websites you don't want to see than to filter them out after.
- chx 5y agoThere's a specific extension doing this for w3schools. Congratulations are in order, I guess...? For being so horrible for so long to have an extension created long ago to nuke you, that is. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-w3schools/gohnadkcefpdhblajddfnhapimpdjkje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-w3schools/g...
- OzyM 5y agoCould someone explain why they're hated? I don't know much about E3, but used them a few times without issue
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y agoI am not sure of the current state of affairs, but in the past (5-10 years ago or longer) w3schools was known for having outdated or sometimes flat out wrong information. They often rank or ranked higher than MDN which is usually the best and most comprehensive source on the subject. So a front end dev would typically want to always see MDN over w3schools.
- neilpa 5y agoMy w3schools workaround is appending `mdn` to any search for something related to web standards
- 42jd 5y agoI have been part of the beta test for kagi search engine (kagi.com) and my favorite feature is you can prefer/mute websites. So for example I prefer MDN so the site is ranked higher if it shows in the search results. Note I’m unaffiliated with them but the product/team is great so rooting for them to succeed.
- nefitty 5y agoI love the preference idea... I'm going to implement that in my personal search engine.
- fiatjaf 5y agoSomeone please add support for DuckDuckGo!
- unixbane 5y agowhat happens if the first N pages google returns are full of only blacklisted sites? this is literally the end of the web. (day of the spider predator animal)
- dopa42365 5y agoSome basic filters for stuff that pops up all the time and is never what I'm looking for: /.pinterest.\../ /.torrent.\../ /.spankbang.\../ /.mp3.\../ /.proxy.\../ /.block.\../ /.addiction.\../ /.recovery.\../ /.detox.\../ /.clinic.\../ /.rehab.\../ /.rarbg.\../ /.hydra.\../ /.123.\../ /.stock.\../ /.linkedin.\../ /.subtitle.\../ /.shopify.\../ /.dreamstime.\../ /.depositphotos.\../ /^(m|mobile|it|es|ja|fr|pl|at|ru)\.\w./ Also recommend TLD filters: /.\.(tk|photo|dev|page|science|ninja|monster|st|cricket|store|website|help|bg|party|work|xyz|link|camera|computer|click|cc|club|pw|space|info|rocks|review|faith|date|win|racing|site|online|tech|news|life|design|nyc|guru|photography|global|today|solutions|media|world|biz|gq|rest|ga|casa|buzz|cam|ml|fit|ly|it|vip|php|pl|ru|app|name|tr|asia|surf|top|cf|tw|uz|am|krd|is|cz|pt|pk|cl|il|in|hu|hr|si|ee|bid|vn|kw|ro|mx|me|market|nu|how|red|guide|mobi|cafe|tn|xxx|icu|fun|pro|desi|id|live|one|ir|forsale)\/(.*)/ (modify for your personal needs, it'll save you many, many hours in the long term)
- fennecfoxen 5y agodot NYC is full of spam? A pity. Hard to get voting or ferry info here without it. :)
- dspillett 5y agoThen edit the list instead of blindly using it? And surely you know the local addresses for such things, or do you search for them using Google every single time you need to travel or vote?
- ouid 5y agoGod damn it. I don't want heroin detox; I want heroin.
- jean_valje4n 5y agoCareful what you wish for
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
- freediver 5y agoFor those interested in this functionality, Kagi search engine (currently in beta) has this built in natively. The counter-part feature (domain boost) is also available. https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- speedgoose 5y ago> Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing. Are they sleeping with the directors of Bing and Google Search to be allowed to do that, or do they use one of these shady companies that proxy google search through hacked computers ?
- freediver 5y agoThere is an API for both.
- speedgoose 5y agoThe Google one is restricted to a small subset of websites so it's useless for a generic search engine. https://developers.google.com/custom-search https://developers.google.com/custom-search The Bing one wants you to write Bing©®™ everywhere, requires you to track your user with their trackers, and forbids most features that would make an alternative search engine useful, such as sorting or filtering the results. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/bing-web-search-api https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/bing-web-search-ap...
- stefanwlb 5y agoThis is awesome!
- noxer 5y agoJust a few month ago HN consensus was that "blacklist" is a bad bad word so it should be named UdisallowList. Funny how this virtue signaling movement died within a few month.
- BbzzbB 5y agoHas one of you smarter people looked thru the code to attest (honor code, I won't sue you) the extension is not shady with it's use of "Access your data for www.google.com" and it's "may use" of "Access your data for all websites"?
- NmAmDa 5y agoI hope someone with experience could do that. Also it passed apple store review process which give me some feel of safe ( hopefully it is not misleading)
- politelemon 5y agoTheir review process has been shown to be a theater, it's meant to instill a dependency; the only way to know it's safe is viewing the source code or asking someone to do it for you.
- it 5y agoI have wanted this for such a long time. Thank you.
- Quenhus 5y agoAs others have said, it can also be done with a uBlock filter. For example, here are my filters that block and remove terrible copycats/translations of StackOverflow https://gist.github.com/quenhus/6bd2c47e5780f726f0c96c0a2ee762a4 https://gist.github.com/quenhus/6bd2c47e5780f726f0c96c0a2ee7... . I hate these copies that somehow manage to be better referenced than StackOverflow.
- ghoomketu 5y agoThis is amazing. I tried extending this to remove all pinterest results too (the real cancer of the internet) but the filter doesn't seem to be working.. Any tips? google.*##.g:has(a[href*="pinterest.*"])
- post_from_work 5y agoNuking Pinterest off of the Internet is what immediately came to my mind as well!
- zibzab 5y agoSeriously, how does something so hated continues to exist? Is some evil billionaire secretly bankrolling Pinterest as a cruel joke?
- politelemon 5y agoAnecdotally, when I've mentioned my hate for Pinterest appearing in search results, several of my coworkers have reacted with surprise. They use it regularly, and mentioned something about pinning interesting results. Our individual minds boggled at each other.
- aembleton 5y agoGoogle will have all those signals that people like using Pintrest and will keep it on the first page.
- jaimex2 5y agoNice. I had been using Personal Blocklist by Google for years and then its community fork. This seems much nicer. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot-by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... I'll certainly give this a go.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- doctat 5y agoI would love something like this for Google News, to block stories by keyword. Supposedly the functionality exists within Gnews itself to do this, but it doesn't work, never has, and I expect it never will.
- guerrilla 5y agoWow, I always wanted this... and it's not only for Google, but DuckDuckGo! Installing. Thanks!
- 14 5y agoIt would be neat to just include a toggle to filter shopping sites. I dislike searching for something like "How to repair X" and instead of getting some good forums you get the top 20 results trying to sell you something related to X.
- mrtweetyhack 5y agoThat face we need a tool like this is a failure on Google
- throwaway69123 5y agoname of this project is very problematic, I suggest they change it to uBlocklist, they also havent unsurprisingly given the name adopted a code of conduct. https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/terminology-its-not-black-and-white https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/terminology-its-not-black-...
- standardUser 5y agoThis reminded me that I've been using an extension to block w3schools.com from my Google search results for many years.
- summerlight 5y agoI always wonder why doesn't Google gives users a personalization option similar to YT's "not interested" which could be used for ranking...? I understand they cannot simply block some website due to antitrust issues, but personalization would be a good rationale and also gives users a good reason to keep their sign-in status.
- sixothree 5y agoBecause time and time again google insists it knows what we want better than we do.
- summerlight 5y agoYour argument doesn't make sense at all since even with that option Google is still in full control of what they want to show.
- jjeaff 5y agoThey probably know that something like that would be games so hard that it would be impossible to filter out the good signal from bad.
- mrVentures 5y agoGoogle blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results.
- superasn 5y agoThe great cat and mouse game 1. uBlock - Blocks annoying ads 2. Sponsorblock - Blocks annoying nordvpn, curiositystream, et al 3. uBlacklist - Blocks annoying pinterest, quora, et al Keep the good fight going guys. Kudos!
- _hiji 5y agodont forget blocknyt.com for twitter. i wish they'd make it extensible so we could subscribe to a variety of blocklists
- kuschkufan 5y agoThey want access to my twitter timeline? Fat chance of that happening...
- unraveller 5y agoDon't forget BlockTube, thanks to it I haven't seen a soyface thumbnail in over a year.
- aembleton 5y agoClickbait remover for YouTube is also good for this https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for...
- zmix 5y agoOn Android, there is "SmartTubeNext" (or so), you may find it via "STN youtube". It just takes out all the crap from YouTube, but keeps all features (at least the ones I know).
- jart 5y agoEvery time I accidentally click a Quora search result it makes me so unhappy. I must have missed the memo about Pinterest though. I always liked that site but haven't been on there in a while. I'm reading up on what's wrong and it sounds like a few years ago it started drowning in ads. Then this year they pushed an update that caused half their users to stop using the platform. Is that accurate?
- rg111 5y agoThis looks great. Pinterest is not getting one more traffic from me. As someone who blogs sometimes, Pinterest has been a huge pain-point in finding images and attributing them properly. It was even sometimes impossible for me to determine the original source of an image and to find out whether or not it could be used in my blog for free. It was a huge pain for downloading images as well. (I have always downloaded pictures for personal and home use only, never for commercial reason.)
- crocodiletears 5y agoMy first thought as well.
- userbinator 5y agoI'm less interested in removing results, than I am in getting the ones that I actually want to be in there. Unfortunately the former is a much easier problem than the latter. Recently, it seems the "scroll through irrelevant results and keep paging to get to the good sites" strategy I've been using for literally over two decades has yielded far less success.
- Proven 5y agoI have been using a Tampermonkey script for this, works great. Fuck gitmemory and all the other scum.
- tonymet 5y agocan i make it whitelist instead ? Google results are so bad
- hans_castorp 5y agoWhat about Qwant?
- speedgoose 5y agoYou mean Bing ?
- hans_castorp 5y agoNo, I mean https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/
- speedgoose 5y agoYes but the search results are from Bing. It's a bit sad story.
- anothernewdude 5y agoDoes it come with pinterest preinstalled?
- causality0 5y agoNice. I'm so sick of never being able to use image search to find a gif because all the search results are fucking videos and not images. Goodbye Giphy, tenor, and all the other useless fake gif sites.
- dt3ft 5y agoIf this was a paid google feature, I would gladly pay for it. Log in, add the sites you never want to see in their search results, save, and use.
- roylez 5y agoSelf-hosting whoogle, now I should remove this plugin.
- thetis 5y agoi just clicked on the link just how to check how can i remove pinterest from my search results. Then i control-F to search other people looking for remove pinterest and it seems i'm not alone :) Pinterest is like pihole: it get all the trafic but the difference is that they keep it for them. As other people are descripting it here, it is a nightmare of a darkpattern. Yesterday, i came randomly (through a french newsletter) to this website https://business.pinterest.com/en/pinterest-predicts/ https://business.pinterest.com/en/pinterest-predicts/ , they sell that they have 400m users WW and 12 'active' users in France (lol). Meanwhile, their trending dashboard is not uninteresting, and reading it would give you the possibility to see what they do with their data (i'm a curious guy). But having the possibility to delete all pinterest links from my search, forerever it an absolute gain of quality of life
- croisillon 5y agoyou gotta love how many of the comments mention pinterest :)
- TheRealSteel 5y agoIncredible; I can finally banish Quora and Pinterest forever.
- forgotpwd16 5y agoThose two are the sites that came in my mind immediately when I read the title.
- jhoelzel 5y agoI feel like at this point I am in need of an ansible for browsers :D Comming from the netscape and the likes, having made many circles around many browsers, I am slowly getting to a point where I simply do not trust any of them anymore. Even Firefox makes moves that I dont like, like social logins and other syncing stuff that, for my personal usecase are completly useless and all I want is a html and javascript renderer. I know, old dogs barking at the train, but I believe that it's us that are to blame for this. Because you know, we build the things.... Sometimes I wonder if our craze for frameworks are to blame for this and the fact that a sponsored framework will -always- have more cash to spare.
- estaseuropano 5y agoIt would be crazy for Firefox not to advance. Yes they haven't done everything in the most communicative way, but the average user now expects password and bookmarks sync and wr all should be grateful they manage to cater to an audience beyond just the IT crowd - else the web would truly be dead.
- jhoelzel 5y agoyes sure and I agree, but I know a lot more people, who do not use these features at all and even more that do not know, that they even exists. Look I have nothing against these features, but if you want to find out what I really do not like, usen an OpenWRT router for a day and have it track outgoing dns packages.
- ThinkBeat 5y agoI miss the days when this was a feature built into Google. It could do all the removal server side. I love uBlacklist. However, when I started to "block" scam sites I became acutely aware of just how many there are. It is like playing endless whack a mole. I recently have had the need download some Windows software and all the top links from Google are scam sites. By that I mean they pretend to look like the legitimate / real site and they can be damn good at it. No wonder my dad for one has downloaded stuff from those kinda sites. I started blocking them, but there seemed to be an endless supply. I am hoping users can work together to create smart blacklists, and there are already some subscription feeds for it. I do worry about performance as the lists grows.
- AltruisticGapHN 5y ago> I miss the days when this was a feature built into Google. It could do all the removal server side. Seriously was this ever possible? On Twitch we can block a channel or category. I believe on Twitter you can say "not interested" although it is more obscure what it does. Google really should have a way of saying "not interested in this website, ever". Plus, wouldn't that be useful data for them?
- dspillett 5y ago> Seriously was this ever possible? I'm pretty sure google used to take some action on terms of the form "-SomethingIDontWant" (for example "nice picture -pinterest") which was common on search engine that pre-dated it. IIRC it never entirely threw out all results with the negative term in them, but it at least used the negative term against results when assessing their weighting. Maybe it still does, but pinterest have done so well at the content saturation and SEO games that even with the negative weighting they drown out more useful results? Either way it is a usability downgrade for Google's image search.
- stelonix 5y agoDomain blocking was some 10+ years ago, while "-site:pinterest.com" still works. I simply use Unpinterested, an extension that adds -site:pinterest to every image search on Google and have been happily ever after.
- Proven 5y agoAnother testimonial about how useless Google search engine has become. In the past Github clones and similar junk would be purged from the index and banned for good. Now GSE is their BFF. Sometimes copies are ranked above the original. Fuck the lot of them.
- kozikow 5y agoIs there a way to remove paid articles from search?
- gverrilla 5y agoIsn't this good for quora and pinterest and alike? Because people won't be bouncing so much there anymore, perhaps google will think they're more relevant?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- gizdan 5y agoIt would be cool if uBlock Origin could have specialised element picker mode for these bigger websites.
- linker3000 5y agoIt would be good if it had an on/off button, like ublock origin.
- tpetry 5y agoThe extension is simply removing the results from the search results. But if the first few pages are results i don't want to see thats not kind of making my life much easier as i just get empty results for the first x ones. Is there any extension which would add all the sites i want to block to google's exclude filter? So the first page has really only interesting results and not none. Like "some js problem -inurl:code-examples.net -inurl:qastack.com.de [...]"
- Graffur 5y agoWhy would I trust this extension?
- nothrowaways 5y agoThe good thing is it is open source. You can inspect/modify it and install it in developer mode.
- Graffur 5y agoGood point
- roofoo12442 5y agoCurrently I'm using Content Farm Remover to do roughly the same thing. The killer feature would be if you could do something about Google News. The difficulty here is Google News mangles all the links into something like: https://news.google.com/articles/CBMijwFodHRwczovL3d3dy5wcmVtaWVyLnRhcy5nb3YuYXUvc2l0ZV9yZXNvdXJjZXNfMjAxNS9hZGRpdGlvbmFsX3JlbGVhc2VzL2FwcG9pbnRtZW50X29mX25ld19wdWJsaWNfdHJ1c3RlZV9jZW8vcmVjb25uZWN0aW5nX3Rhc21hbmlhX3RvX3RoZV93b3JsZNIBAA?hl=en-AU&gl=AU&ceid=AU%3Aen https://news.google.com/articles/CBMijwFodHRwczovL3d3dy5wcmV...
- mianos 5y agoThis even blocks snippets, which have largely become full of useless answers and waste half the first page. I can only assume everyone at google is on holidays. AWESOME!
- gear_envy 5y agoThis extension makes Google bearable. No more Quora, Medium, Pinterest, or any of that other stuff. I'm curious about what other people on HN are blocking. I find myself searching a lot about upcoming video games or Apple products and I was quite sick of seeing all of the same SEOed-to-death clickbait nonsense.