17 ms·

uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

543 points by sanketpatrikar 4y ago

synergy20 4y ago
I have been using 'personal blocklist' extension for over a year and it worked well, going to try uBlacklist now.
darthrupert 4y ago
Marvellous, I have been looking for this for a while.
ezekg 4y ago
Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com), which offers the same feature. :)
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  I have yet to find any competitor which provides its own results and is even 50% as good as Google's results. Features are nice, but for a search engine results are everything.
  - gnuj3 4y ago
    Kagi is even better than Google in my opinion. I’m still thinking whether I want to pay a subscription for it but it’s tempting since the results are so good. M When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time as I wasnt happy with the results, especially local such as finding a specific shop in my area etc. I dont recall using g! with Kagi, and when I was bored and compared the Kagi search result with Google to see if I was missing out, it turned to be the other way - I realised I was actually getting a much wider spectrum of results. I discovered many cool websites and blogs I never knew excited thanks to it or rather thanks to the fact that they show you what’s relevant to your search unlike Google that shows what they think is.
    - suslik 4y ago
      To me Kagi also feels way better than google. I am paying for the service.
    - Maximus9000 4y ago
      > When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time lol, I did the exact same thing! After a month of that, I just went back to Google :(. Google's results are just so damn good.
      - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        That was me a couple of years ago, I've tried DDG every year since it was announced on HN as a project. Google got worse and DDG got better, I use DDG mostly now (also Kagi and Brave, Google, and very occasionally Bing).
      - infamia 4y ago
        Try !s for Startpage when DDG doesn't have what you want. Startpage uses Google's index and is quite good. DDG and StartPage together give me more (and higher quality results) without Google's obnoxiously deceptive ads.
    - brodo 4y ago
      I've had the same experience. Maybe it's my developer bubble, but Kagi has better search results than Google for me.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Ha! I'm the opposite. When I use someone else's computer, I get confused because the results are all crap, then I have to manually type duckduckgo.com into their URL bar. At least Google Search has started blocking itself with a consent wall on new devices. It's the best feature from them in a while, at least for me. I wish their tracking stuff was opt in too.
    - nsilvestri 4y ago
      Kagi is honestly not good at all about local results. I use !g the most often when trying to find information about stores or restaurants. For all other "encyclopedic" knowledge, like Wikipedia (pinned), Stack Exchange, blogs, etc., Kagi has way less SEO spam than Google.
  - rfrey 4y ago
    From reading the site it seems like Kagi uses Google on the backend, so it's probably privacy, filtering and presentation you're paying for.
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.
  - PeterPumpkin45 4y ago
    A lot of people seem surprisingly happy with Kagi's results but I would like to put my hand up as someone who is, so far, underwhelmed and occasionally frustrated. I realise I've started automatically starting almost all of my searches with the prefix to search via Google instead. I recently reinstalled my desktop OS and I've been happily delaying configuring Kagi as my default browser search. It's slower, sometimes painfully so (maybe due to downtime? Understandable but not fun). I really miss Google's cards; for example, finding opening hours for a local business is immediate in Google, but requires opening another link which may not even be correct in Kagi. When I'm searching errors or code examples, sometimes Kagi embeds a useless snippet with little relevance. Sometimes it has a bizarre 'memory effect' where one or two of the results will be ghosts from an earlier search but completely unrelated to the current search term. It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.
    - freediver 4y ago
      Kagi does not have local search results (yet). Speed is on average faster than Google for most users, so if that is not the case for you please let us know via https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org And if there is any kind of bug, glitch or issue please also use kagifeedback.org > It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise. If is far from perfect. I would say we are 30% through what our vision for the product looks like. I can totally understand how it does not meet your expectation right now. The beauty of our model is that people pay with their wallets, not their data, and the momemt the product sucks, we lose a customer (or don't get one like in your case). Incentives are perfectly aligned. The fact that barely a week afer the public beta launch, over a thousand people already pay for Kagi, while still being in beta and (very) rough around the edges, is the greatest motivation we can have to serve our user community well and continuing improving the product in the future.
    - deltree7 4y ago
      HN crowd for all their smartness are as ego-driven and as susceptible to human biases like everyone else. Most opinions come from an irrational hate towards Google. (It's the nerd equivalent to be edgy/hip among peers by hating something popular). Then there is sunk cost fallacy, like I pay $10, it must be good. It's not Google, it must be good (never mind that the founders of all these companies are all cut from the same silicon valley cloth and are equally good/evil/shades of grey) Finally, it's the illusion of "Feel Good factors" -- Privacy, David vs Goliath
- Belphemur 4y ago
  Being using it through the beta and moved toward their annual subscription :) Also you can give more importance to some website in the search result, create your own search template. It's so feature rich, and to make things easier they provide and extension to set your default search engine for you.
  - ayushnix 4y ago
    I was considering subscribing to Kagi but $10/month is almost as expensive as my fiber broadband connection and I don't think I can justify this expense. I would likely subscribe if it was $5/month.
    - Belphemur 4y ago
      I thought the same at first. Then I thought on an annual budget and price. Does Kagi worth $120 per year for me ? Yes, yes it does, it's barely nothing compared to the value of having proper search result. I checked ... I make more than 50 searches per day... $120 yearly is nothing compared to other expenses that I have like my broadband internet around $70 per month for it...
      - xtracto 4y ago
        My thought process was like that: i do 50 searches per day, i lose on average 3 seconds per search filtering ads, pinterest,quota,geekforgeek,etc. results. This means 150 second or 3 minutes a day. Which means 1.5 hours a month. My hourly rate is about $70 USD, so paying $10 to give me back $100 of my time seemed like a good deal.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Beat me to it! Kagi also goes one step further and allows you to "pin" sites to the top. For example, I've got MDN pinned, so whenever I'm searching for web stuff they're the top result, even if there's an SEO'd blog post that normally would have come first. Abandoning Google is a huge motivator for me, but this feature set is why it's my primary search engine. Google tries to guess what I want and just ends up feeding me the same garbage it feeds everyone else. Kagi allows me to correct it when it guesses wrong. That makes all the difference.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    I used to just download the MDN docs to my computer so I can search locally. Offline search beats everything. You don't need the Internet to search.
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?
  - heretogetout 4y ago
    I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - MauranKilom 4y ago
      But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side. At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed. One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)
      - pitched 4y ago
        Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  Does it support IE6? (Google does, and it's a browser I enjoy using.)
  - 0des 4y ago
    for those who need a double scoop of agencies to go with their agency.
  - rajamaka 4y ago
    Why would anyone support a deprecated browser?
    - prepend 4y ago
      Because customers like it and they want to retain or attract those customers. (Basically the same reason any company does anything)
  - matyasrichter 4y ago
    Is this the next iteration of the "I browse with javascript disabled" HN comment?
  - freediver 4y ago
    We didn’t try yet but Kagi works the same with JS disabled. JS is there to enhance UX, not create it. Let us know.
    - forgotmypw17 4y ago
      That is a good start!
- Patrol8394 4y ago
  Landing page : signup or login No thank you
- digitalsin 4y ago
  I started using it a couple of weeks ago, absolutely love it. I haven't gone back to google a single time yet. I see people complain about a price, but I suspect also they complain about being tracked by google. I guess you can pick your poison. I think I'd rather pay a few bucks a month at this point, but to each his own.
  - Normille 4y ago
    There are other, better, free options. See my comment above. Startpage + GHHBD.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Normille 4y ago
  ...or use Grease/Tamper/Violent- monkey and the excellent Google Hit Hider by Domain[0] --which is free and [in spite of the name] works across all major search engines. I feel like an evangelist for this script as I seem to mention it on an almost monthly basis here. But, as the saying goes "No connection. Just a happy user." PS: as I said last time 'uBlacklist' was promoted here; whatever the merits of your product, trying to subconsciously associate yourself with the excellent 'uBlock Origin', by using a similar naming convention, is very shady. PPS: reading the rest of the comments, I'm amazed at the number of people saying they've signed up for this, or intend to. $10 a month for something you could have for free --and we're supposed to be in recessionary times. It's true what they say about 'a fool and his money...' [0] https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/ https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
  - function_seven 4y ago
    About your PPS: I search from my own machine, from my work laptop, and from my phone. I also use different browsers. Maintaining a user script to “undo” crap results won’t work well in this scenario. Having those settings saved in the search engine itself is really nice! I’m a paying Kagi user now, and this isn’t my first comment gushing over that product. :)
  - dinkleberg 4y ago
    You’re joking right? We’re on a forum where a good chunk of the people commenting have 6-figure salaries, some on the very high side of that. And some here have a lot more money than that. $10/mo for something used many times every day is a drop in the bucket for many. It’s not true for all, but for many.
    - prepend 4y ago
      It’s not the amount. It’s the value for me. $10 for something that is minimal value is the path to ruin, especially when done by many people. There’s opportunity cost (ie, what if I donated to charity, etc) but mainly I want to support high value products with some link to costs. All these “just the price of coffee” 4-hour-work-week type things are an unhealthy way of looking at the world. I like open source so I can stop worrying about stuff that has near zero marginal costs. I hate to think of a future where everything I enjoy or use is “just $10 every month.”
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Wow it costs them 1c per search to service your request!
- jarek83 4y ago
  Just tried the first example search "best laptop" and results are not really very useful - usually old content and none of the results showed the publishing dates of the articles. https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop
  - freediver 4y ago
    What are the ideal results for “best laptop”?
    - hoorible 4y ago
      This is for sure a really hard question to answer, but I think we can agree that a 2017 blog post does not constitute the “idea results” for this query, no? FWIW I was a beta tester, and (mostly) enjoyed my experience, but having this as a demo of Kagi’s abilities on your splash page does not inspire confidence in the product IMO.
      - freediver 4y ago
        There are two schools of thought on how to answer this query: Here is #1 result on Google: https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best-laptops-1304361 https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best... Here is #1 result on Kagi: https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever Kagi's result showcases our philosophy of preferring non-commercial content to commercial/SEO/affiliate content. It may not be for everyone. If the users want that they can find the same link as Google's #1 in a section called listicles. We show this example on purpose so that we manage expectations on what you will get Kagi from the very first interaction.
- corrral 4y ago
  I need to get around to signing up. I started a couple weeks back, but stalled about some question re: what search means to you, or something like that, went off for a while to think about it, and never went back. Guess I need to just write "finding stuff" or something trite and get on with it. (don't ask me open-ended questions as part of a signup process unless you want me to brain-lock and never finish the form :-) Though I just checked and it looks like the signup flow's very different and more normal now, so that's good)
  - ezekg 4y ago
    You probably had to answer questions during their closed beta, so they could look for and invite specific user types as they ramped up. As of last week, IIRC, they're now in open beta. That could explain why their sign up flow changed.
    - corrral 4y ago
      Makes sense. I wasn't mad about it or anything, just noticed that it had that effect on me, and was like, "huh, weird". The three or four times I'd thought about going back, remembering that was there had stopped me, too ("eh, I don't want to get started and just end up abandoning it again, waste of time") until checking again after reading this thread.
- tgv 4y ago
  I've tried Kagi a few times, but the results were not better than qwant.com (which is quite comparable to DuckDuckGo and Brave).
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    Except Qwant and Brave are their own search engines, unlike DuckDuckGo who sources Bing. The first two add diversity to the search engine industry.
  - prophesi 4y ago
    The results have been fine for me, the date filtering and archive.org results in particular have been really helpful. And as an FYI, Kagi runs their own web crawler, but also sources from Google & Bing. https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from Of course, I'm biased as I was a beta tester and now a subscriber, hoping they succeed.
- bl_valance 4y ago
  It is great, I used it during their early-access, but the 10/month is a bit steep tbh. I would be more inclined to pay up at <5/month. One of my favourite features was the toggle for showing results only from discussion boards.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tandr 4y ago
  $1-2 per month would be worth it for me. But $10 per month just for search - no, it is not, sorry.
- mimimi31 4y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like a great service and I'd love to support them, but as a student I just can't justify $10/month as long as Google with an adblocker is still an okay experience. Credit card being the only payment option is another problem, since I (like most people where I live) only have a debit card, with credit cards usually costing extra. I'll definitely keep an eye on kagi though, hoping for more payment options and a <$5 subscription.
  - freediver 4y ago
    Kagi accepts debit cards.
    - mimimi31 4y ago
      It depends on the kind of debit card apparently. What I have is a girocard[1], which doesn't have the required 16 digit card number and CVC. I didn't even know that debit cards can have those. My online payments are usually made via SEPA bank transfers, Giropay[2] or Paypal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard [2] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay
      - freediver 4y ago
        Paypal support coming soon!
- fallat 4y ago
  uBlacklist is actually better than Kagi for a multitude of reasons. http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi-but-lessons-learned.txt http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi... Expresses it a bit better...
- babypuncher 4y ago
  I've been using Kagi for almost two months and I absolutely love it. Well worth the $10/mo they started charging a couple weeks ago.
- redox99 4y ago
  I tried Kagi a month ago, compared about 20 queries to Google, and all of them were either equal or worse on Kagi compared to Google. Also showing the date on reddit threads was either broken or not there.
- e-dt 4y ago
  I signed up for Kagi during the closed beta, and used it for a bit. But I kept going back to Google for some searches, the proportion of which was steadily increasing over time, until almost unconsciously I was tabbing down to "search with Google" every time I searched. At that point I figured it was a revealed preference and went back to Google.
bstar77 4y ago
I only need this for W3Schools.
- Vanit 4y ago
  100% the bane of my trying to use Google for Mozilla docs.
  - eddd-ddde 4y ago
    ddg, then you have !mdn for mozilla docs !mdn Array sort works like a charm, there's also !rust, !cpp, etc
- ortusdux 4y ago
  Blocking pintrest from image search results is also very helpful.
- skilled 4y ago
  Absolutely crazy how such a low quality site comes up for technical queries. Speaks volumes for how smart Google algorithm is.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    I wouldn't doubt many people click W3Schools results when they see them, they're not that bad, the explanation is straightforward, and it has exercises and a REPL for immediate practice. That reinforces their ranking as useful results. Conversely, I have no idea why Pinterest plagues everything. Does it manage to trick many people into clicking for a login form?
    - skilled 4y ago
      W3Schools is the prime example that Google does use site authority for its ranking approach. A lot of their content is thin one-liners that don’t explain the subject you’re looking an answer for.
- 4y ago
dezmou 4y ago
Great now I will be able to never see quora.com again
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Belphemur 4y ago
  I'd argue all Q&A services devolve into madness when they get mainstream. Before Quora we had yahoo answer and before that surely something else. As soon as they get mainstream the quality of question and answer goes down. Those systems only work with well defined constraints either on the subject of the question or the validation of the expertise of the people answering. All of those platform just open the valve with close to no moderation. We can see the same with Reddit and big sub Reddit.
  - skilled 4y ago
    This is largely platform’s fault though. Quora had every opportunity to stop site spammers from posting non-informative answers just to farm clicks for the blog posts they link to for the “full” answer. Mind boggling that Google hasn’t penalised them since years ago.
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      Google didn't penalize Pinterest either. In Google image search, Pinterest results are abundant but clicking on them and viewing them requires a sign-up on Pinterest. I still remember the good old days of Quora; it was a nice era but it's gone...
  - Normille 4y ago
    You think Quora is bad? Try blocking Pinterest from your search results. I swear those bastards have registered pinterest<dot><every-fucking-TLD-in-existence>
    - orangepurple 4y ago
ki_ 4y ago
- infinityio 4y ago
  Out of interest, what do you consider to be credible/high quality news orgs?
  - ki_ 4y ago
    I dont really read news anymore. But i think forbes was a decent one. I havent checked in a while though. edit: i'd say hackernews is a good way know about things. much variety. edit2: news is not really that important to begin with. It's just about what's happening in the world. It's not that important to know that. You rather want to fill up your brain with information about engineering, science, nature, etc. You know.. information that you can "USE". That's why it's "useful".
- dangerlibrary 4y ago
  This comment has me confused and slightly concerned about what organizations you would consider credible.
  - ki_ 4y ago
    News organizations are low quality by default. Their bussiness model is creating multiple articles per day and make it sound interesting, sometimes more interesting than what really happened. This so they can maximize viewer retention and therefore maximize ad-revenue. It's not really a recipe where you'll find the most accurate truth. You can still read their websites for information, but when you google, those news website tend to fill up the first 3 pages of your results and often you find better information once you get past those websites. e.g. independant journalist blog sites or scientific papers, etc... I also like to search back in time. e.g. when you want to learn about coronavirusses, it's better to search before january 2020. Else your results get filled with articles from journalist that never even heard of corona virusses before they wrote their article.
lordgilman 4y ago
I'm using uBlacklist plus these two blacklists that block out spam sites that clone pages from Stack Overflow and Github. https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translation https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio... https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation
- behnamoh 4y ago
  You can also import these lists in uBlock Origin's filters and use one fewer extension.
- franga2000 4y ago
  Shameless plug for the blacklist I maintain: https://github.com/franga2000/aliexpress-fake-sites https://github.com/franga2000/aliexpress-fake-sites Anyone who has tried to buy something obscure locally will probably find this useful. There are hundreds of fake webstores that pretend to be in different countries (using national TLDs and machine translation), then just redirect you to AliExpress. I have a script that can recognise them and add them to this blocklist.
- idk1 4y ago
  The ironic thing is, those sites you block have most likely cloned your github page and published blocklists for themselves on their own site.
fokker 4y ago
- causi 4y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.
- xigoi 4y ago
  The real inclusivity is being able to use the word “black” without seeing a connection with race in it.
  - corrral 4y ago
    I try to be sympathetic to the "color blind is still racist" thing, since I'm white so maybe my perspective's not that useful. But I definitely feel a lot more racist and way more race-aware, to no productive purpose and in contexts where it can't possibly matter, than I did 20 years ago, as a result of this stuff. My kids are way more race-aware than I was at their ages, as a result, too. I sure hope whatever good is coming of this is worth it. I don't like it a bit.
    - xigoi 4y ago
      I agree, but this is not even a case of “colorblind is still racist” — it's seeing race where there is none.
    - ignoramceisblis 4y ago
      Being "color blind" is not being racist. It's the opposite. Be good to good people--that's what matters.
causi 4y ago
Excellent, I can finally use Image Search without every single gif result being a damn video file.
- vwcx 4y ago
  And pinterest!
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    Yes fuck Pinterest.
its_Caffeine 4y ago
You can already do this if you're logged into google I have geeksforgeeks blocked because that site is a complete pile of garbage
- sanketpatrikar 4y ago
  I am logged into google and don't see such an option. How do you achieve that?
- wmeredith 4y ago
  How? I thought they did away with this feature a decade ago.
kramerger 4y ago
Finally I can get rid of those deadend Pinterest results... Edit. And quora
- schleck8 4y ago
  There is also a privacy respecting frontend for Quora which removes the bloat https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends#quora https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends#quor...
  - kramerger 4y ago
    Privacy is important, but in this particular case I just want to hide low quality search results.
- dopa42365 4y ago
  You can use something like this to get rid of their millions of domains. /.pinterest.\../ /.dreamstime.\../ /.depositphotos.\../ /.gettyimages.\../ and whatever else you (don't) want. Or get rid of specific TLDs in your search results. /.\.(porn|casino|xxx|zone)\/(.*)/
  - sanketpatrikar 4y ago
    Seems like you didn't properly escape some of your asterisks.
    - dopa42365 4y ago
      Well, tell HN to add a proper code formatting option!
- ishbasho 4y ago
  I specifically installed this extension for Quora some time ago.
krono 4y ago
I've posted this before, but you can achieve the same with uBlock Origin static filters alone without having to install any additional extensions. For example: To block results from specific domains on Google or DDG: google.*##.g:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"]) duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"]) And it's even possible to target an element's text content with a `:has-text(/regex/)` selector: google.*##.g:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i)) duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i)) As a bonus, here's how to get rid of Medium's obnoxious cookie notification across all domains: *##body > div > div:has(*:has-text(/To make Medium work.*Privacy Policy.*Cookie Policy/i))
- LightHugger 4y ago
  Having a button to remove the offending site right from the search results saves quite a bit of time, so while i usually prefer not to have extra extensions, i see a lot of utility here.
  - account42 4y ago
    Same reason why I still use uMatrix in addition to uBlock even though custom rules in the latter are not any less powerful - user interface matters.
    - LightHugger 4y ago
      Exactly! i often wish the umatrix UI was just merged into ublock origin as an optional tool.
      - pbronez 4y ago
        Wasn’t it though? Just click the “I’m an advanced user” button in the uBlock Origin options. Then you get the per-domain block details in the uBlock Origin extension button just like uMatrix.
        4y ago
adictator 4y ago
dionian 4y ago
the biggest problem with google, for me, is their internal blacklist - nothing i can do to get them to stop censoring. this is a nice start though. still sticking with bing as the lesser of evils. i switch to google sometimes if i cant find what i want on bing (for non-controversial topics that google doesnt censor, its still the best)
rawoke083600 4y ago
medium.com should be top of the list !
- behnamoh 4y ago
  to be fair, there are some good articles on Medium. But I agree, most are click-baits due to Medium's partnership program.
  - rawoke083600 4y ago
    You right and I don't like it ! :/
swader999 4y ago
Doesn't Google do this well enough already?
- baobob 4y ago
  Not even slightly
miohtama 4y ago
W3c.org
Saint_Genet 4y ago
Just enabled the ios safari extension, and it works very nice on DDG
gbraad 4y ago
Anything to make pinterest disappear from my search results
oofbey 4y ago
- peterhadlaw 4y ago
  Missing /s at the end
  - oofbey 4y ago
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      - oofbey 4y ago
        almog 4y ago
        At first I thought he was just misinformed and tried to politely correct them, but now I see that they really just try to provoke people and using arguments of similar structures to the ones caring so much about displaying the Confederate Flag "because it's part of their American history".
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        Yes, obviously because I disagree with your word banning I must be one of those confederate flag waving rednecks. It would be impossible for me to be a lifelong liberal voter with a track record of donating to liberal causes, a certificate in LGBTQ studies and a history of activism on a variety of issues. Sensible people can have sensible disagreements. Jumping to insulting people who disagree with you and tarring them is poor form and reflects badly on your position.
jakobov 4y ago
Google search is so bad we need blacklists. Really says something
- alar44 4y ago
  What does it say?
  - timbit42 4y ago
    It says Google search is bad.
  - zucked 4y ago
    It says that certain sites (cough:pinterest:cough) have totally poisoned the search results and that little has been done to rectify that.
    - klausjensen 4y ago
      That is certainly google's fault. :) Google lets them poison the results.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    It says Google is losing the SEO war.
- spaceywilly 4y ago
  Yeah, google search has really gone downhill lately. It’s hard to find quality results among all of the auto generated garbage.
stephane-klein 4y ago
I use https://github.com/pistom/hohser https://github.com/pistom/hohser since few months with success.
marcodiego 4y ago
Goodbye pinterest.
pbreit 4y ago
- Tao3300 4y ago
  I think we're far enough removed from the 1660 Stuart Restoration that no one is going to confuse this with the list of regicides of Charles I.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    I think that we're not far enough removed from anything to not be mindful of terms that imply that white==good and black==bad.
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      This is such a misguided train of logic that I can't quite figure out where it's wrong. Like those maths puzzles that prove 1=0.
      - barbazoo 4y ago
        What do you mean? Personally I'm trying to avoid any terms that imply that black==bad. Black people, just like other groups of people, experience discrimination and abuse and I'm mindful of that. To me it would be the same as naming something christianlist and muslimlist to denote "good" and "bad", maybe that's a better example. At the end of the day I think my approach is not making the world any worse and possible might even make it infinitesimally better. But you do you, I have no problem with that.
        kleer001 4y ago
        > What do you mean? It's a wild goose chase. It's The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and it's garbage. > Black people, just like other groups of people, experience discrimination and abuse Sometimes. Other people do sometimes too and it sometimes has nothing to do with their skin colour. > my approach is not making the world any worse That's misguided. Maybe focus on making yourself better first before mucking with the rest of the world.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
Finally an easy solution to Pinterest image spam.
throwaway123808 4y ago
My mind immediately went to uMatrix or uBlockOrigin. Just want to note that, so far as I can tell, this is not associated with the author (gorhill) of those other tools: https://github.com/gorhill https://github.com/gorhill
donohoe 4y ago
Anyone know a similar extension that works for DuckDuckGo too? (Ideally one extension that covers numerous search engines) I've been using "Personal Blocklist(not by Google)" for Google search and is pretty good too: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot-by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
- erikcw 4y ago
  According to the README, this also works with DDG and some other search engines.
- wallmountedtv 4y ago
  It works with duckduckgo as well, you just enable it in the options menu.
- sanketpatrikar 4y ago
  You can enable uBlacklist to work on DDG and other search engines from settings.
kazinator 4y ago
To take the best advantage of this, you want to crank up the results per page setting in the search engine. This is because the deletions simply cut results form each page without the results being repaginated. I made a lot of use of uBlacklist; but then I found Huawei's petalsearch.com, where pretty much none of the crap that I deleted appears in the first place. uBlacklist is really just a band-aid solution for a garbage search engine; it doesn't address the root cause.
- bjord 4y ago
  probably won't get any of those pesky results critical of the chinese government, either
  - kazinator 4y ago
    So you might think. But I just tried the search terms "tiananmen square massacre" in PetalSearch. It comes up with the Wikipedia page on the subject, just like Google does. The second result in PetalSearch points to the rationalwiki, whose text begins "The Tiananmen Square Massacre was a ruthless crackdown on a pro-democracy protest ..."; and that is quoted in the search result. The next results after that are news items about Chinese censorship: "China censors tank-shaped Viennetta ice cream on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre" "China Censors Top Livestreamer, Fans Question Potential Link To Tiananmen Square Massacre Reference" and others. Seems all right to me. Of course, I'm not able to repeat this test from within China; but how would Google and others fare there?
flowinho 4y ago
- permo-w 4y ago
  ignoring social justice concerns, "blocklist" is a more descriptive word
  - mikestaub 4y ago
    allowList and denyList is best
  - YATA2 4y ago
    No it's not. List of filesystem blocks? List of block devices? Or use blacklist, a word that has a definition that predates modern computing and non-English speakers can quickly translate using any old translator, dictionary, etc.
    - permo-w 4y ago
      if you don't know what either a blacklist or blocklist is, the word blocklist is significantly easier to glean yes block has 1 other meaning, but that pales compared to black which doesn't have the descriptive meaning in the first place
      - YATA2 4y ago
        >block has 1 other meaning Wrong. A list of blocked processes? >the word blocklist is significantly easier to glean No it's not. If you don't know what "blacklist" means, you can pick up any dictionary from the 1700s and later and get a definition.
        permo-w 4y ago
        >Wrong. A list of blocked processes? that's the same meaning. the processes are blocked from proceeding >No it's not. If you don't know what "blacklist" means, you can pick up any dictionary from the 1700s and later and get a definition that's not what glean means >Wrong >No it's not why are you taking this confrontational tone? it's unpleasant and doesn't help your case
Vladimof 4y ago
I like this extension but I don't use it that much because I tend to avoid Google...
- Night_Thastus 4y ago
  Google Hit Hider (despite the name) works for non-google search engines and is free. Worth a look.
  - Vladimof 4y ago
    must be an Apple thing, I can't find it
    - Night_Thastus 4y ago
      It's not an apple thing. It's a userscript, available on any browser that supports extensions like Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey - so both Chrome and FF.
citizenpaul 4y ago
This tool is amazing. I know is simple but it has made search sooooo much better. It works on other search engines besides google as well. Yeah I know you can do it with uBlock but having the button is much simpler.
jppope 4y ago
its too bad there isn't a way to block the nytimes on hacker news
- permo-w 4y ago
  program it yourself
polyrand 4y ago
You can do the same with uBlock Origin filters. But writing them manually is hard. I use https://letsblock.it/filters https://letsblock.it/filters to automatically generate lists of sites for the different search engines. It's been working wonderfully.
- WalterSobchak 4y ago
  This is pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.
spread_love 4y ago
What features are offered here that aren't in the similar "Personal Blocklist (not by Google)" extension?
radicaldreamer 4y ago
Finally, an easy way to ban forbes and heavy.com and their clickbait.
i13e 4y ago
Here are some well-maintained filterlists for ublock-origin that remove github/stack overflow copycats from search results https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
rc_mob 4y ago
this is cool. kagi has this as a built in feature
northisup 4y ago
love the player hate the name
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
This is great, but the existing subscription lists leave a ton to desired, still. Porn for instance has huge amounts of SEO spam and yet there doesn't seem to be a list for that, which is surprising considering porn and its consumers are usually the first to adopt new tech.
Night_Thastus 4y ago
I've been using Google Hit Hider, a userscript, for this for years. I can import/export my list, sites can be both "banned" and "blocked", I can de-duplicate and de-www my lists if needed, etc. It's very flexible. (Despite the name, it's DDG compatible as well) It's also completely free. What advantages does this have over Google Hit Hider?
NonNefarious 4y ago
Google used to allow this on its search page, but of course they couldn't have users filtering spam and trash out of their results that might cost Google a penny.
richardsocher 4y ago
you.com let's you select the sources and apps you want to see more of in the appstore you.com/apps
trinovantes 4y ago
This only applies display:none to the bad sites which means for some queries, your entire search results might be empty To get full results, you have to use "-site" but sadly Google limits queries to 32 words which means for a 5 word query, you can only "blacklist" up to 27 sites
kgwxd 4y ago
Years ago, I made a FireFox addon for myself to do exactly this but everywhere on the internet. You specify a regular express to match attribute values and/or text, and the CSS to apply to the elements containing the matches. You can specify any CSS you want but if it's something like visibility: hidden or display: none it has this effect (and is the only thing I've actually used it for). It even worked on FireFox for Android when that supported proper addons. It's really nice to never see a link to Facebook, Twitter, etc anywhere on the internet. It's almost like they don't exist. It causes a few oddities here and there (The text matching is problematic but it's optional, the attribute value matching works really well), but I've never missed anything important. I feel like if everyone had this power everywhere, it would serve as incentive for sites to not suck. It took some fun javascript APIs I've never had to use before (like MutationObserver and TreeWalker) to get it to work right and efficiently, especially on sites that load content via JS (like Google). Source: https://github.com/7w0/ssure https://github.com/7w0/ssure (the interesting bits are in content.js) Addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/
dang 4y ago
Related: uBlacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433 - Dec 2021 (294 comments)
wanderingmind 4y ago
There are custom filters for development you can import in ublock origin targeted to remove SEO spam in Google/DDG [1] [1] https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
ghostly_s 4y ago
Unfortunately the problem I most often encounter with "unwanted" search results is not isolated useless sites but when the results for anything shopping-related are multiple full pages of crappy SEO-spam results. If anyone has tips for addressing this situation I'd be much obliged.
- BaronSamedi 4y ago
  If any of the alternative search engines would offer this and a feature to block pages with affiliate links--like those "review" sites--I would be happy to pay for them. They need to offer ways to customize the search experience.
dlyn 4y ago
Is there a way to do something complementary to this? To curate a list of websites that have valuable information on some topic / domain, and have those results raised first?
- timbit42 4y ago
  Some search engines support this, like Kagi.
stereoradonc 4y ago
This is super cool! Thanks OP for posting this for non-techies.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
warabe 4y ago
Does anyone know how to manage firefox extension's permission? This extension asks permissions to "Access for my data for google.*" and optionally "Access my data for all websites". However, I don't want to give it access to the data for all websites. It is insane. I want to have stricter permission control. For example, since I only use google and duckduckgo, I want to give this extension access for the data for google and duckduckgo.
noisy_boy 4y ago
I wonder if I'm the rare minority who doesn't mind sites like geeksforgeeks because I don't use them as authoritative reference but just to lookup/double-check syntax and/or code examples. Their information isn't great but the code snippet is right there which ironically might not be the case with sites that have dense information but are low on examples. However, when I need the gory details, I just visually skip geeksforgeeks and its ilk from the search results. Maybe we need a enable/disable toggle in uBlocklist to cater to the above "modes" of search.
GRBurst 4y ago
The name is very misleading when it is only a blocker for Google search

synergy20 4y ago

I have been using 'personal blocklist' extension for over a year and it worked well, going to try uBlacklist now.

darthrupert 4y ago

Marvellous, I have been looking for this for a while.

ezekg 4y ago

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi (https://kagi.com https://kagi.com), which offers the same feature. :)

iLoveOncall 4y ago
I have yet to find any competitor which provides its own results and is even 50% as good as Google's results. Features are nice, but for a search engine results are everything.
- gnuj3 4y ago
  Kagi is even better than Google in my opinion. I’m still thinking whether I want to pay a subscription for it but it’s tempting since the results are so good. M When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time as I wasnt happy with the results, especially local such as finding a specific shop in my area etc. I dont recall using g! with Kagi, and when I was bored and compared the Kagi search result with Google to see if I was missing out, it turned to be the other way - I realised I was actually getting a much wider spectrum of results. I discovered many cool websites and blogs I never knew excited thanks to it or rather thanks to the fact that they show you what’s relevant to your search unlike Google that shows what they think is.
  - suslik 4y ago
    To me Kagi also feels way better than google. I am paying for the service.
  - Maximus9000 4y ago
    > When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time lol, I did the exact same thing! After a month of that, I just went back to Google :(. Google's results are just so damn good.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      That was me a couple of years ago, I've tried DDG every year since it was announced on HN as a project. Google got worse and DDG got better, I use DDG mostly now (also Kagi and Brave, Google, and very occasionally Bing).
    - infamia 4y ago
      Try !s for Startpage when DDG doesn't have what you want. Startpage uses Google's index and is quite good. DDG and StartPage together give me more (and higher quality results) without Google's obnoxiously deceptive ads.
  - brodo 4y ago
    I've had the same experience. Maybe it's my developer bubble, but Kagi has better search results than Google for me.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Ha! I'm the opposite. When I use someone else's computer, I get confused because the results are all crap, then I have to manually type duckduckgo.com into their URL bar. At least Google Search has started blocking itself with a consent wall on new devices. It's the best feature from them in a while, at least for me. I wish their tracking stuff was opt in too.
  - nsilvestri 4y ago
    Kagi is honestly not good at all about local results. I use !g the most often when trying to find information about stores or restaurants. For all other "encyclopedic" knowledge, like Wikipedia (pinned), Stack Exchange, blogs, etc., Kagi has way less SEO spam than Google.
- rfrey 4y ago
  From reading the site it seems like Kagi uses Google on the backend, so it's probably privacy, filtering and presentation you're paying for.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.
- PeterPumpkin45 4y ago
  A lot of people seem surprisingly happy with Kagi's results but I would like to put my hand up as someone who is, so far, underwhelmed and occasionally frustrated. I realise I've started automatically starting almost all of my searches with the prefix to search via Google instead. I recently reinstalled my desktop OS and I've been happily delaying configuring Kagi as my default browser search. It's slower, sometimes painfully so (maybe due to downtime? Understandable but not fun). I really miss Google's cards; for example, finding opening hours for a local business is immediate in Google, but requires opening another link which may not even be correct in Kagi. When I'm searching errors or code examples, sometimes Kagi embeds a useless snippet with little relevance. Sometimes it has a bizarre 'memory effect' where one or two of the results will be ghosts from an earlier search but completely unrelated to the current search term. It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.
  - freediver 4y ago
    Kagi does not have local search results (yet). Speed is on average faster than Google for most users, so if that is not the case for you please let us know via https://kagifeedback.org https://kagifeedback.org And if there is any kind of bug, glitch or issue please also use kagifeedback.org > It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise. If is far from perfect. I would say we are 30% through what our vision for the product looks like. I can totally understand how it does not meet your expectation right now. The beauty of our model is that people pay with their wallets, not their data, and the momemt the product sucks, we lose a customer (or don't get one like in your case). Incentives are perfectly aligned. The fact that barely a week afer the public beta launch, over a thousand people already pay for Kagi, while still being in beta and (very) rough around the edges, is the greatest motivation we can have to serve our user community well and continuing improving the product in the future.
  - deltree7 4y ago
    HN crowd for all their smartness are as ego-driven and as susceptible to human biases like everyone else. Most opinions come from an irrational hate towards Google. (It's the nerd equivalent to be edgy/hip among peers by hating something popular). Then there is sunk cost fallacy, like I pay $10, it must be good. It's not Google, it must be good (never mind that the founders of all these companies are all cut from the same silicon valley cloth and are equally good/evil/shades of grey) Finally, it's the illusion of "Feel Good factors" -- Privacy, David vs Goliath
Belphemur 4y ago
Being using it through the beta and moved toward their annual subscription :) Also you can give more importance to some website in the search result, create your own search template. It's so feature rich, and to make things easier they provide and extension to set your default search engine for you.
- ayushnix 4y ago
  I was considering subscribing to Kagi but $10/month is almost as expensive as my fiber broadband connection and I don't think I can justify this expense. I would likely subscribe if it was $5/month.
  - Belphemur 4y ago
    I thought the same at first. Then I thought on an annual budget and price. Does Kagi worth $120 per year for me ? Yes, yes it does, it's barely nothing compared to the value of having proper search result. I checked ... I make more than 50 searches per day... $120 yearly is nothing compared to other expenses that I have like my broadband internet around $70 per month for it...
    - xtracto 4y ago
      My thought process was like that: i do 50 searches per day, i lose on average 3 seconds per search filtering ads, pinterest,quota,geekforgeek,etc. results. This means 150 second or 3 minutes a day. Which means 1.5 hours a month. My hourly rate is about $70 USD, so paying $10 to give me back $100 of my time seemed like a good deal.
lolinder 4y ago
Beat me to it! Kagi also goes one step further and allows you to "pin" sites to the top. For example, I've got MDN pinned, so whenever I'm searching for web stuff they're the top result, even if there's an SEO'd blog post that normally would have come first. Abandoning Google is a huge motivator for me, but this feature set is why it's my primary search engine. Google tries to guess what I want and just ends up feeding me the same garbage it feeds everyone else. Kagi allows me to correct it when it guesses wrong. That makes all the difference.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  I used to just download the MDN docs to my computer so I can search locally. Offline search beats everything. You don't need the Internet to search.
MauranKilom 4y ago
Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?
- heretogetout 4y ago
  I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - MauranKilom 4y ago
    But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side. At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed. One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)
    - pitched 4y ago
      Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
Does it support IE6? (Google does, and it's a browser I enjoy using.)
- 0des 4y ago
  for those who need a double scoop of agencies to go with their agency.
- rajamaka 4y ago
  Why would anyone support a deprecated browser?
  - prepend 4y ago
    Because customers like it and they want to retain or attract those customers. (Basically the same reason any company does anything)
- matyasrichter 4y ago
  Is this the next iteration of the "I browse with javascript disabled" HN comment?
- freediver 4y ago
  We didn’t try yet but Kagi works the same with JS disabled. JS is there to enhance UX, not create it. Let us know.
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    That is a good start!
Patrol8394 4y ago
Landing page : signup or login No thank you
digitalsin 4y ago
I started using it a couple of weeks ago, absolutely love it. I haven't gone back to google a single time yet. I see people complain about a price, but I suspect also they complain about being tracked by google. I guess you can pick your poison. I think I'd rather pay a few bucks a month at this point, but to each his own.
- Normille 4y ago
  There are other, better, free options. See my comment above. Startpage + GHHBD.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Normille 4y ago
...or use Grease/Tamper/Violent- monkey and the excellent Google Hit Hider by Domain[0] --which is free and [in spite of the name] works across all major search engines. I feel like an evangelist for this script as I seem to mention it on an almost monthly basis here. But, as the saying goes "No connection. Just a happy user." PS: as I said last time 'uBlacklist' was promoted here; whatever the merits of your product, trying to subconsciously associate yourself with the excellent 'uBlock Origin', by using a similar naming convention, is very shady. PPS: reading the rest of the comments, I'm amazed at the number of people saying they've signed up for this, or intend to. $10 a month for something you could have for free --and we're supposed to be in recessionary times. It's true what they say about 'a fool and his money...' [0] https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/ https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
- function_seven 4y ago
  About your PPS: I search from my own machine, from my work laptop, and from my phone. I also use different browsers. Maintaining a user script to “undo” crap results won’t work well in this scenario. Having those settings saved in the search engine itself is really nice! I’m a paying Kagi user now, and this isn’t my first comment gushing over that product. :)
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  You’re joking right? We’re on a forum where a good chunk of the people commenting have 6-figure salaries, some on the very high side of that. And some here have a lot more money than that. $10/mo for something used many times every day is a drop in the bucket for many. It’s not true for all, but for many.
  - prepend 4y ago
    It’s not the amount. It’s the value for me. $10 for something that is minimal value is the path to ruin, especially when done by many people. There’s opportunity cost (ie, what if I donated to charity, etc) but mainly I want to support high value products with some link to costs. All these “just the price of coffee” 4-hour-work-week type things are an unhealthy way of looking at the world. I like open source so I can stop worrying about stuff that has near zero marginal costs. I hate to think of a future where everything I enjoy or use is “just $10 every month.”
quickthrower2 4y ago
Wow it costs them 1c per search to service your request!
jarek83 4y ago
Just tried the first example search "best laptop" and results are not really very useful - usually old content and none of the results showed the publishing dates of the articles. https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop
- freediver 4y ago
  What are the ideal results for “best laptop”?
  - hoorible 4y ago
    This is for sure a really hard question to answer, but I think we can agree that a 2017 blog post does not constitute the “idea results” for this query, no? FWIW I was a beta tester, and (mostly) enjoyed my experience, but having this as a demo of Kagi’s abilities on your splash page does not inspire confidence in the product IMO.
    - freediver 4y ago
      There are two schools of thought on how to answer this query: Here is #1 result on Google: https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best-laptops-1304361 https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best... Here is #1 result on Kagi: https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever Kagi's result showcases our philosophy of preferring non-commercial content to commercial/SEO/affiliate content. It may not be for everyone. If the users want that they can find the same link as Google's #1 in a section called listicles. We show this example on purpose so that we manage expectations on what you will get Kagi from the very first interaction.
corrral 4y ago
I need to get around to signing up. I started a couple weeks back, but stalled about some question re: what search means to you, or something like that, went off for a while to think about it, and never went back. Guess I need to just write "finding stuff" or something trite and get on with it. (don't ask me open-ended questions as part of a signup process unless you want me to brain-lock and never finish the form :-) Though I just checked and it looks like the signup flow's very different and more normal now, so that's good)
- ezekg 4y ago
  You probably had to answer questions during their closed beta, so they could look for and invite specific user types as they ramped up. As of last week, IIRC, they're now in open beta. That could explain why their sign up flow changed.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Makes sense. I wasn't mad about it or anything, just noticed that it had that effect on me, and was like, "huh, weird". The three or four times I'd thought about going back, remembering that was there had stopped me, too ("eh, I don't want to get started and just end up abandoning it again, waste of time") until checking again after reading this thread.
tgv 4y ago
I've tried Kagi a few times, but the results were not better than qwant.com (which is quite comparable to DuckDuckGo and Brave).
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  Except Qwant and Brave are their own search engines, unlike DuckDuckGo who sources Bing. The first two add diversity to the search engine industry.
- prophesi 4y ago
  The results have been fine for me, the date filtering and archive.org results in particular have been really helpful. And as an FYI, Kagi runs their own web crawler, but also sources from Google & Bing. https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from Of course, I'm biased as I was a beta tester and now a subscriber, hoping they succeed.
bl_valance 4y ago
It is great, I used it during their early-access, but the 10/month is a bit steep tbh. I would be more inclined to pay up at <5/month. One of my favourite features was the toggle for showing results only from discussion boards.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tandr 4y ago
$1-2 per month would be worth it for me. But $10 per month just for search - no, it is not, sorry.
mimimi31 4y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like a great service and I'd love to support them, but as a student I just can't justify $10/month as long as Google with an adblocker is still an okay experience. Credit card being the only payment option is another problem, since I (like most people where I live) only have a debit card, with credit cards usually costing extra. I'll definitely keep an eye on kagi though, hoping for more payment options and a <$5 subscription.
- freediver 4y ago
  Kagi accepts debit cards.
  - mimimi31 4y ago
    It depends on the kind of debit card apparently. What I have is a girocard[1], which doesn't have the required 16 digit card number and CVC. I didn't even know that debit cards can have those. My online payments are usually made via SEPA bank transfers, Giropay[2] or Paypal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard [2] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay
    - freediver 4y ago
      Paypal support coming soon!
fallat 4y ago
uBlacklist is actually better than Kagi for a multitude of reasons. http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi-but-lessons-learned.txt http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi... Expresses it a bit better...
babypuncher 4y ago
I've been using Kagi for almost two months and I absolutely love it. Well worth the $10/mo they started charging a couple weeks ago.
redox99 4y ago
I tried Kagi a month ago, compared about 20 queries to Google, and all of them were either equal or worse on Kagi compared to Google. Also showing the date on reddit threads was either broken or not there.
e-dt 4y ago
I signed up for Kagi during the closed beta, and used it for a bit. But I kept going back to Google for some searches, the proportion of which was steadily increasing over time, until almost unconsciously I was tabbing down to "search with Google" every time I searched. At that point I figured it was a revealed preference and went back to Google.

bstar77 4y ago

I only need this for W3Schools.

Vanit 4y ago
100% the bane of my trying to use Google for Mozilla docs.
- eddd-ddde 4y ago
  ddg, then you have !mdn for mozilla docs !mdn Array sort works like a charm, there's also !rust, !cpp, etc
ortusdux 4y ago
Blocking pintrest from image search results is also very helpful.
skilled 4y ago
Absolutely crazy how such a low quality site comes up for technical queries. Speaks volumes for how smart Google algorithm is.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I wouldn't doubt many people click W3Schools results when they see them, they're not that bad, the explanation is straightforward, and it has exercises and a REPL for immediate practice. That reinforces their ranking as useful results. Conversely, I have no idea why Pinterest plagues everything. Does it manage to trick many people into clicking for a login form?
  - skilled 4y ago
    W3Schools is the prime example that Google does use site authority for its ranking approach. A lot of their content is thin one-liners that don’t explain the subject you’re looking an answer for.
4y ago

dezmou 4y ago

Great now I will be able to never see quora.com again

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Belphemur 4y ago
I'd argue all Q&A services devolve into madness when they get mainstream. Before Quora we had yahoo answer and before that surely something else. As soon as they get mainstream the quality of question and answer goes down. Those systems only work with well defined constraints either on the subject of the question or the validation of the expertise of the people answering. All of those platform just open the valve with close to no moderation. We can see the same with Reddit and big sub Reddit.
- skilled 4y ago
  This is largely platform’s fault though. Quora had every opportunity to stop site spammers from posting non-informative answers just to farm clicks for the blog posts they link to for the “full” answer. Mind boggling that Google hasn’t penalised them since years ago.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    Google didn't penalize Pinterest either. In Google image search, Pinterest results are abundant but clicking on them and viewing them requires a sign-up on Pinterest. I still remember the good old days of Quora; it was a nice era but it's gone...
- Normille 4y ago
  You think Quora is bad? Try blocking Pinterest from your search results. I swear those bastards have registered pinterest<dot><every-fucking-TLD-in-existence>
  - orangepurple 4y ago

ki_ 4y ago

infinityio 4y ago
Out of interest, what do you consider to be credible/high quality news orgs?
- ki_ 4y ago
  I dont really read news anymore. But i think forbes was a decent one. I havent checked in a while though. edit: i'd say hackernews is a good way know about things. much variety. edit2: news is not really that important to begin with. It's just about what's happening in the world. It's not that important to know that. You rather want to fill up your brain with information about engineering, science, nature, etc. You know.. information that you can "USE". That's why it's "useful".
dangerlibrary 4y ago
This comment has me confused and slightly concerned about what organizations you would consider credible.
- ki_ 4y ago
  News organizations are low quality by default. Their bussiness model is creating multiple articles per day and make it sound interesting, sometimes more interesting than what really happened. This so they can maximize viewer retention and therefore maximize ad-revenue. It's not really a recipe where you'll find the most accurate truth. You can still read their websites for information, but when you google, those news website tend to fill up the first 3 pages of your results and often you find better information once you get past those websites. e.g. independant journalist blog sites or scientific papers, etc... I also like to search back in time. e.g. when you want to learn about coronavirusses, it's better to search before january 2020. Else your results get filled with articles from journalist that never even heard of corona virusses before they wrote their article.

lordgilman 4y ago

I'm using uBlacklist plus these two blacklists that block out spam sites that clone pages from Stack Overflow and Github. https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translation https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio... https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation

behnamoh 4y ago
You can also import these lists in uBlock Origin's filters and use one fewer extension.
franga2000 4y ago
Shameless plug for the blacklist I maintain: https://github.com/franga2000/aliexpress-fake-sites https://github.com/franga2000/aliexpress-fake-sites Anyone who has tried to buy something obscure locally will probably find this useful. There are hundreds of fake webstores that pretend to be in different countries (using national TLDs and machine translation), then just redirect you to AliExpress. I have a script that can recognise them and add them to this blocklist.
idk1 4y ago
The ironic thing is, those sites you block have most likely cloned your github page and published blocklists for themselves on their own site.

fokker 4y ago

causi 4y ago
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.
xigoi 4y ago
The real inclusivity is being able to use the word “black” without seeing a connection with race in it.
- corrral 4y ago
  I try to be sympathetic to the "color blind is still racist" thing, since I'm white so maybe my perspective's not that useful. But I definitely feel a lot more racist and way more race-aware, to no productive purpose and in contexts where it can't possibly matter, than I did 20 years ago, as a result of this stuff. My kids are way more race-aware than I was at their ages, as a result, too. I sure hope whatever good is coming of this is worth it. I don't like it a bit.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    I agree, but this is not even a case of “colorblind is still racist” — it's seeing race where there is none.
  - ignoramceisblis 4y ago
    Being "color blind" is not being racist. It's the opposite. Be good to good people--that's what matters.

causi 4y ago

Excellent, I can finally use Image Search without every single gif result being a damn video file.

vwcx 4y ago
And pinterest!
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Yes fuck Pinterest.

its_Caffeine 4y ago

You can already do this if you're logged into google I have geeksforgeeks blocked because that site is a complete pile of garbage

sanketpatrikar 4y ago
I am logged into google and don't see such an option. How do you achieve that?
wmeredith 4y ago
How? I thought they did away with this feature a decade ago.

kramerger 4y ago

Finally I can get rid of those deadend Pinterest results... Edit. And quora

schleck8 4y ago
There is also a privacy respecting frontend for Quora which removes the bloat https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends#quora https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends#quor...
- kramerger 4y ago
  Privacy is important, but in this particular case I just want to hide low quality search results.
dopa42365 4y ago
You can use something like this to get rid of their millions of domains. /.pinterest.\../ /.dreamstime.\../ /.depositphotos.\../ /.gettyimages.\../ and whatever else you (don't) want. Or get rid of specific TLDs in your search results. /.\.(porn|casino|xxx|zone)\/(.*)/
- sanketpatrikar 4y ago
  Seems like you didn't properly escape some of your asterisks.
  - dopa42365 4y ago
    Well, tell HN to add a proper code formatting option!
ishbasho 4y ago
I specifically installed this extension for Quora some time ago.

krono 4y ago

I've posted this before, but you can achieve the same with uBlock Origin static filters alone without having to install any additional extensions. For example: To block results from specific domains on Google or DDG: google.*##.g:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"]) duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"]) And it's even possible to target an element's text content with a `:has-text(/regex/)` selector: google.*##.g:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i)) duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i)) As a bonus, here's how to get rid of Medium's obnoxious cookie notification across all domains: *##body > div > div:has(*:has-text(/To make Medium work.*Privacy Policy.*Cookie Policy/i))

LightHugger 4y ago
Having a button to remove the offending site right from the search results saves quite a bit of time, so while i usually prefer not to have extra extensions, i see a lot of utility here.
- account42 4y ago
  Same reason why I still use uMatrix in addition to uBlock even though custom rules in the latter are not any less powerful - user interface matters.
  - LightHugger 4y ago
    Exactly! i often wish the umatrix UI was just merged into ublock origin as an optional tool.
    - pbronez 4y ago
      Wasn’t it though? Just click the “I’m an advanced user” button in the uBlock Origin options. Then you get the per-domain block details in the uBlock Origin extension button just like uMatrix.
      - 4y ago

adictator 4y ago

dionian 4y ago

the biggest problem with google, for me, is their internal blacklist - nothing i can do to get them to stop censoring. this is a nice start though. still sticking with bing as the lesser of evils. i switch to google sometimes if i cant find what i want on bing (for non-controversial topics that google doesnt censor, its still the best)

rawoke083600 4y ago

medium.com should be top of the list !

behnamoh 4y ago
to be fair, there are some good articles on Medium. But I agree, most are click-baits due to Medium's partnership program.
- rawoke083600 4y ago
  You right and I don't like it ! :/

swader999 4y ago

Doesn't Google do this well enough already?

baobob 4y ago
Not even slightly

miohtama 4y ago

W3c.org

Saint_Genet 4y ago

Just enabled the ios safari extension, and it works very nice on DDG

gbraad 4y ago

Anything to make pinterest disappear from my search results

oofbey 4y ago

peterhadlaw 4y ago
Missing /s at the end
- oofbey 4y ago
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    - oofbey 4y ago
      - almog 4y ago
        At first I thought he was just misinformed and tried to politely correct them, but now I see that they really just try to provoke people and using arguments of similar structures to the ones caring so much about displaying the Confederate Flag "because it's part of their American history".
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        Yes, obviously because I disagree with your word banning I must be one of those confederate flag waving rednecks. It would be impossible for me to be a lifelong liberal voter with a track record of donating to liberal causes, a certificate in LGBTQ studies and a history of activism on a variety of issues. Sensible people can have sensible disagreements. Jumping to insulting people who disagree with you and tarring them is poor form and reflects badly on your position.

jakobov 4y ago

Google search is so bad we need blacklists. Really says something

alar44 4y ago
What does it say?
- timbit42 4y ago
  It says Google search is bad.
- zucked 4y ago
  It says that certain sites (cough:pinterest:cough) have totally poisoned the search results and that little has been done to rectify that.
  - klausjensen 4y ago
    That is certainly google's fault. :) Google lets them poison the results.
- jandrese 4y ago
  It says Google is losing the SEO war.
spaceywilly 4y ago
Yeah, google search has really gone downhill lately. It’s hard to find quality results among all of the auto generated garbage.

stephane-klein 4y ago

I use https://github.com/pistom/hohser https://github.com/pistom/hohser since few months with success.

marcodiego 4y ago

Goodbye pinterest.

pbreit 4y ago

Tao3300 4y ago
I think we're far enough removed from the 1660 Stuart Restoration that no one is going to confuse this with the list of regicides of Charles I.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  I think that we're not far enough removed from anything to not be mindful of terms that imply that white==good and black==bad.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    This is such a misguided train of logic that I can't quite figure out where it's wrong. Like those maths puzzles that prove 1=0.
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      What do you mean? Personally I'm trying to avoid any terms that imply that black==bad. Black people, just like other groups of people, experience discrimination and abuse and I'm mindful of that. To me it would be the same as naming something christianlist and muslimlist to denote "good" and "bad", maybe that's a better example. At the end of the day I think my approach is not making the world any worse and possible might even make it infinitesimally better. But you do you, I have no problem with that.
      - kleer001 4y ago
        > What do you mean? It's a wild goose chase. It's The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and it's garbage. > Black people, just like other groups of people, experience discrimination and abuse Sometimes. Other people do sometimes too and it sometimes has nothing to do with their skin colour. > my approach is not making the world any worse That's misguided. Maybe focus on making yourself better first before mucking with the rest of the world.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

Finally an easy solution to Pinterest image spam.

throwaway123808 4y ago

My mind immediately went to uMatrix or uBlockOrigin. Just want to note that, so far as I can tell, this is not associated with the author (gorhill) of those other tools: https://github.com/gorhill https://github.com/gorhill

donohoe 4y ago

Anyone know a similar extension that works for DuckDuckGo too? (Ideally one extension that covers numerous search engines) I've been using "Personal Blocklist(not by Google)" for Google search and is pretty good too: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot-by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

erikcw 4y ago
According to the README, this also works with DDG and some other search engines.
wallmountedtv 4y ago
It works with duckduckgo as well, you just enable it in the options menu.
sanketpatrikar 4y ago
You can enable uBlacklist to work on DDG and other search engines from settings.

kazinator 4y ago

To take the best advantage of this, you want to crank up the results per page setting in the search engine. This is because the deletions simply cut results form each page without the results being repaginated. I made a lot of use of uBlacklist; but then I found Huawei's petalsearch.com, where pretty much none of the crap that I deleted appears in the first place. uBlacklist is really just a band-aid solution for a garbage search engine; it doesn't address the root cause.

bjord 4y ago
probably won't get any of those pesky results critical of the chinese government, either
- kazinator 4y ago
  So you might think. But I just tried the search terms "tiananmen square massacre" in PetalSearch. It comes up with the Wikipedia page on the subject, just like Google does. The second result in PetalSearch points to the rationalwiki, whose text begins "The Tiananmen Square Massacre was a ruthless crackdown on a pro-democracy protest ..."; and that is quoted in the search result. The next results after that are news items about Chinese censorship: "China censors tank-shaped Viennetta ice cream on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre" "China Censors Top Livestreamer, Fans Question Potential Link To Tiananmen Square Massacre Reference" and others. Seems all right to me. Of course, I'm not able to repeat this test from within China; but how would Google and others fare there?

flowinho 4y ago

permo-w 4y ago
ignoring social justice concerns, "blocklist" is a more descriptive word
- mikestaub 4y ago
  allowList and denyList is best
- YATA2 4y ago
  No it's not. List of filesystem blocks? List of block devices? Or use blacklist, a word that has a definition that predates modern computing and non-English speakers can quickly translate using any old translator, dictionary, etc.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    if you don't know what either a blacklist or blocklist is, the word blocklist is significantly easier to glean yes block has 1 other meaning, but that pales compared to black which doesn't have the descriptive meaning in the first place
    - YATA2 4y ago
      >block has 1 other meaning Wrong. A list of blocked processes? >the word blocklist is significantly easier to glean No it's not. If you don't know what "blacklist" means, you can pick up any dictionary from the 1700s and later and get a definition.
      - permo-w 4y ago
        >Wrong. A list of blocked processes? that's the same meaning. the processes are blocked from proceeding >No it's not. If you don't know what "blacklist" means, you can pick up any dictionary from the 1700s and later and get a definition that's not what glean means >Wrong >No it's not why are you taking this confrontational tone? it's unpleasant and doesn't help your case

Vladimof 4y ago

I like this extension but I don't use it that much because I tend to avoid Google...

Night_Thastus 4y ago
Google Hit Hider (despite the name) works for non-google search engines and is free. Worth a look.
- Vladimof 4y ago
  must be an Apple thing, I can't find it
  - Night_Thastus 4y ago
    It's not an apple thing. It's a userscript, available on any browser that supports extensions like Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey - so both Chrome and FF.

citizenpaul 4y ago

This tool is amazing. I know is simple but it has made search sooooo much better. It works on other search engines besides google as well. Yeah I know you can do it with uBlock but having the button is much simpler.

jppope 4y ago

its too bad there isn't a way to block the nytimes on hacker news

permo-w 4y ago
program it yourself

polyrand 4y ago

You can do the same with uBlock Origin filters. But writing them manually is hard. I use https://letsblock.it/filters https://letsblock.it/filters to automatically generate lists of sites for the different search engines. It's been working wonderfully.

WalterSobchak 4y ago
This is pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.

spread_love 4y ago

What features are offered here that aren't in the similar "Personal Blocklist (not by Google)" extension?

radicaldreamer 4y ago

Finally, an easy way to ban forbes and heavy.com and their clickbait.

i13e 4y ago

Here are some well-maintained filterlists for ublock-origin that remove github/stack overflow copycats from search results https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

rc_mob 4y ago

this is cool. kagi has this as a built in feature

northisup 4y ago

love the player hate the name

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

This is great, but the existing subscription lists leave a ton to desired, still. Porn for instance has huge amounts of SEO spam and yet there doesn't seem to be a list for that, which is surprising considering porn and its consumers are usually the first to adopt new tech.

Night_Thastus 4y ago

I've been using Google Hit Hider, a userscript, for this for years. I can import/export my list, sites can be both "banned" and "blocked", I can de-duplicate and de-www my lists if needed, etc. It's very flexible. (Despite the name, it's DDG compatible as well) It's also completely free. What advantages does this have over Google Hit Hider?

NonNefarious 4y ago

Google used to allow this on its search page, but of course they couldn't have users filtering spam and trash out of their results that might cost Google a penny.

richardsocher 4y ago

you.com let's you select the sources and apps you want to see more of in the appstore you.com/apps

trinovantes 4y ago

This only applies display:none to the bad sites which means for some queries, your entire search results might be empty To get full results, you have to use "-site" but sadly Google limits queries to 32 words which means for a 5 word query, you can only "blacklist" up to 27 sites

kgwxd 4y ago

Years ago, I made a FireFox addon for myself to do exactly this but everywhere on the internet. You specify a regular express to match attribute values and/or text, and the CSS to apply to the elements containing the matches. You can specify any CSS you want but if it's something like visibility: hidden or display: none it has this effect (and is the only thing I've actually used it for). It even worked on FireFox for Android when that supported proper addons. It's really nice to never see a link to Facebook, Twitter, etc anywhere on the internet. It's almost like they don't exist. It causes a few oddities here and there (The text matching is problematic but it's optional, the attribute value matching works really well), but I've never missed anything important. I feel like if everyone had this power everywhere, it would serve as incentive for sites to not suck. It took some fun javascript APIs I've never had to use before (like MutationObserver and TreeWalker) to get it to work right and efficiently, especially on sites that load content via JS (like Google). Source: https://github.com/7w0/ssure https://github.com/7w0/ssure (the interesting bits are in content.js) Addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/

dang 4y ago

Related: uBlacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433 - Dec 2021 (294 comments)

wanderingmind 4y ago

There are custom filters for development you can import in ublock origin targeted to remove SEO spam in Google/DDG [1] [1] https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

ghostly_s 4y ago

Unfortunately the problem I most often encounter with "unwanted" search results is not isolated useless sites but when the results for anything shopping-related are multiple full pages of crappy SEO-spam results. If anyone has tips for addressing this situation I'd be much obliged.

BaronSamedi 4y ago
If any of the alternative search engines would offer this and a feature to block pages with affiliate links--like those "review" sites--I would be happy to pay for them. They need to offer ways to customize the search experience.

dlyn 4y ago

Is there a way to do something complementary to this? To curate a list of websites that have valuable information on some topic / domain, and have those results raised first?

timbit42 4y ago
Some search engines support this, like Kagi.

stereoradonc 4y ago

This is super cool! Thanks OP for posting this for non-techies.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

warabe 4y ago

Does anyone know how to manage firefox extension's permission? This extension asks permissions to "Access for my data for google.*" and optionally "Access my data for all websites". However, I don't want to give it access to the data for all websites. It is insane. I want to have stricter permission control. For example, since I only use google and duckduckgo, I want to give this extension access for the data for google and duckduckgo.

noisy_boy 4y ago

I wonder if I'm the rare minority who doesn't mind sites like geeksforgeeks because I don't use them as authoritative reference but just to lookup/double-check syntax and/or code examples. Their information isn't great but the code snippet is right there which ironically might not be the case with sites that have dense information but are low on examples. However, when I need the gory details, I just visually skip geeksforgeeks and its ilk from the search results. Maybe we need a enable/disable toggle in uBlocklist to cater to the above "modes" of search.

GRBurst 4y ago

The name is very misleading when it is only a blocker for Google search