6 ms·

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of simil

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google would show me the actual domain registrars instead (like chatgpt does when i ask it). Google has been gamed so badly and they have been doing nothing about it just because the spam blog posts contains their ads. There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. There is only so much an adblocker can do to fix search. And right now all the useful content is getting blocked while the spam content is not only allowed but ranking on top of everything.

xbkingx 3y ago
The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, and abandoned). If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.
- cout 3y ago
  I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.
  - Quekid5 3y ago
    Yup, same for me. It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)
    - wpietri 3y ago
      Totally. Advertising is fundamentally about distracting someone so you can put money in your pocket without regard to the impact on that someone. I have a lot of complaints about, say, McDonald's, but they make their money through giving people something of value to them. Advertising legitimizes the making of money in a way unrelated to value delivery. (The same is true about a lot of finance.) When you combine that with up-and-to-the-right numerical goals and standard executive incentives, over time you pretty much guarantee what Doctorow calls "enshittification". Delivering value becomes at best a side effect of the system.
      - AlecSchueler 3y ago
        Aren't McDonald's one of the biggest advertisers in the world? They sell poor quality food on the basis of brand recognition.
        praptak 3y ago
        That's unrelated to the point GP is making. The point is that they are not incentivized to put poison into burgers to get money from the poison industry.
        courseofaction 3y ago
        Well put. Ads are the poison of information.
    - LaundroMat 3y ago
      That's exactly what Brin and Page said in the paper where they presented Google... "[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" and "[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm." Both from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998)
  - paradox460 3y ago
    I've used uBlocklist to filter these things since Google removed that feature
- Animats 3y ago
  Yes. We can point to the exact moment in time when Google turned to the dark side. It was on August 9, 2006, when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] This was the moment that SEO, now officially endorsed by Google's CEO, became respectable. Until then, SEO was considered to be a branch of the spam industry. There were conferences such as the Web Search Spam Squashing Summit in 2005 on how to kill it. [1] https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html
  - AdamN 3y ago
    There was/is whitehat SEO: properly creating links to relevant content within a site, using keywords that help bots find relevant content, traversing your own site to make sure there aren't dead zones with content that will never be found. Google should have leaned into just this small segment of tooling and done much more of a ban hammer on the bad actors. They didn't and a bunch of people have left. I use DuckDuckGo mostly and sometimes Google but never by default. I don't even like DDG that much but it's good enough.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    SEO sends the message that you have a content writer, and, thus, that you are a well established business (The content that is required to be produced is more nefarious than having hamster marketing guys spin in wheels, but the nature of the work is irrelevant to Google).
  - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
    [dead]
  - nine_k 3y ago
    > web rings and link indexes The popular "Awesome ${whatever}" collections are very much that, link indexes for relatively narrow areas. Curation matters. This is something computers are still bad at, or are too expensive to deploy for a mass-market service.
    - anotheruser13 3y ago
- collaborative 3y ago
  I am trying something different that might work for you with aisearch.vip The challenge will be staying true to not showing ads, respecting user privacy, and not requiring a subscription. So far, the only thing that works is free daily quota + pre-paid
  - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
    [dead]
- pupppet 3y ago
  Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.
  - DougN7 3y ago
    Brilliant idea!
  - wintermutestwin 3y ago
    Until ChatGPT came along, I figured it was inevitable that human curated search came back into ascendancy as the crawler model has become such a failure. Now we can use ChatGPT to filter through Google's infested mess, but this double edged Sword of Damocles will be able to create infinite attempts to bury genuine content with ad spam.
  - drpixie 3y ago
    You might have stumbled onto a practical and useful application of LLMs. Yahoo (or whoever) could crawl the web, categorise each page, and provide a genuine "Index". Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub--sub-sub...category with something like the original page-rank. Now if Yahoo (or whoever) could avoid the enshitification trap ... imagine what a fabulous resource that could be.
    - flyinghamster 3y ago
      > Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) Now that is an awesome idea. I really do think we need to have category-based indexing as well as page search.
  - symonda 3y ago
    This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.
- pentagrama 3y ago
  I think that there are current SEO practices that make sense that a search engine uses as a ranking signal, like accessibility (mobile friendliness, screen reader compatibility, +), time to load (performance, image optimization, no js bloat), security (https), no stuff appearing on top the content (modals), use of h tags and breadcrumbs to order content, srucured data for bots and more. Of course people game the system, apply shady practices, sell courses with tips. It is a nuance topic, the name now is bastardized by marketing companies doing shady things, but on his core is just practices to create good websites and provide a good user experience
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s. Unfortunately, there's no going back - the closest we can get is BBS-via-SSH. The entire landline phone infrastructure is crumbling around us (or in many cases, completely gone). Voice calls are packet-switched now, rather than circuit-switched as in the past. The upshot is, fancy modulation techniques that made full-duplex 33.6k possible over voice-grade connections aren't going to work, and even good old Bell 103 (300 baud) may end up being problematic. I'm not sure I can even get new landline phone service, and if so, it's going to be expensive - and the wire plant is an unmaintained mess. When I got my folks off their landline and onto VoIP some years back, their old landline had so much hum it was nearly unusable. Once the inside wiring was disconnected from the landline and connected to an ATA, the hum was gone. It wasn't our wiring.
nikanj 3y ago
I always have a feeling they could get surprisingly far by having one person doing random searches, then tagging all the obvious spam to be deindexed. But Google is very adamant about never hiring a person to do a job well, if AI can be trained to do the same job badly
- stevenicr 3y ago
  Don't they have whole teams of people looking at sites through the lens of the leaked 'quality rater guidelines' - ? I thought it was like a few thousand people in the philippines downranking sites for thousands of reasons - without being transparent about possible biases and such. Maybe I'm thinking of somewhere else. And wasn't there a story about a bunch people who were doing similar as 1099 contractors in the US striking because they were not getting a living wage or something?
  - pavs 3y ago
    Looking at the quality of current google searches I highly doubt it. I mean I could single handedly remove thousands of domains in a month and improve google search result, I have a hard time believing that they have 1000s of people doing it and the quality is this shitty.
    - creato 3y ago
      They were fined 2.4 billion euros for downranking a shitty SEO spam operation: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/07/google-shopping-lawsuit/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/07/google-shopping-lawsuit/am.... How many of those thousand domains will result in billion dollar fines?
      - _v7gu 3y ago
        Wow, that is not what that article is saying at all.
        creato 3y ago
redsaber 3y ago
> There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. Oh I did use ublacklist which mixes blocking in both of the google search and the google image search. But curious what is the filter you have in your uBlock origin?
- Quenhus 3y ago
  I'm not OP, but here is my own uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
  - redsaber 3y ago
    thank you!
  - redsaber 3y ago
    thanks
QuantumGood 3y ago
You can use the AdGuard Annoyances list in the uBlock Origin settings to block certain types of content. This includes blocking cookie scripts that pop up every time you opt out of non-essential cookies. It also has an unbreak filter list that, when used in combination with EasyList, can remove anti-adblock warnings .
tacker2000 3y ago
Yea why cant i just remove these spammy Stack Overflow clones. Its wasting me precious time whenever I need some answers. Seems like such an easy feature but yea Google already lost its way a long time ago…
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I googled something. One of the results was "title (recommended)". That should be enough for Google to ban the result.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  so Google should have a list of titles that if found cause them to ban the result, which frankly might affect people with little personal sites who aren't very good at making sites but just want to put up some stuff they really know a lot about, but anyway is there any other items in the list? I'm pretty sure SEO sites will be able to figure out don't title your page "title (recommended)".
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    When all this search engine 'things' came about websites were indexed organically. Then websites started to optimize for what Google actually parsed. Meta tags, no things behind JavaScript, semantic markup etc. And that worked really well. Stuff was easy to find. Those were the best days. There was some luring, but at least if you were looking for something technical you found it (provided it existed and was indexed). This is no longer the case. Give you an example: Any search term for Windows+Error+KB<number> is a nuclear wasteland of companies having copy-paste pages only to sell you their services at the end. Lately the same has been popping up on YouTube. Any search for an issue with formatting a harddrive lists 20 pages which sell formatting tools. A search for checking whether a certain animal is dangerous yields wildly inaccurate results just to sell me pest control. Spoiler: it was a Jerusalem Bug. You don't get a fever at all. The thing just has huge mouthparts, and that can physically hurt. When you put "(recommended)" in your title because you know it's then displayed verbatim in Google is nasty. All driven by these websites which 'recommend' things to you.
Semaphor 3y ago
> Pinterest Kagi recently released a leaderboard for per-domain customization: https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png They are 2nd for "lowered" and first for "blocked".
- buro9 3y ago
  Well that's a feature that I might be willing to pay for. Add Twitter to that list and I'll start finding accessible content again.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    They have block/lower/raise/pin for domains, and additionally, they support regex rewriting of domain names, all my twitter results on Kagi redirect to nitter (though I don’t know if that still works, I was gone last week)
    - yosito 3y ago
      Ohhh regex rewriting for domain names? I'm a paying customer for two months but I hadn't discovered that feature yet. Thanks!
- Llamamoe 3y ago
  Kagi is amazing but the costs are very non-negligible. :F
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I agree, but then I have very few subscriptions, so there's space in the budget ;)
  - traverseda 3y ago
    More than 1.5 cents per search is a lot, they're pricing model really discourages me from making them my default search engine. A $10 unlimited search would be more justifiable. $15 would be stretching it. If I'm not on a functionally unlimited unlimited plan (rate limiting is fine if it's reasonable) then I have to think about it every time I search. Should I really be searching here or should I be using the search box on stackoverflow or github or Wikipedia? Just introduces some constan cognitive frisson to the experience.
sjkdfkjdsfhjkhs 3y ago
It's also not clear why Google killed Blogger. More investment in Blogger with better linking between blogs (the way you can @someone on Twitter) and discovery (#tag searches allowing you to see posts from multiple blogs, curated blogrolls), more realtime/live logging functionality, easy microblogging functionality, etc. would probably have led to a lot more content existing on Google owned spaces, as opposed to being siloed behind Facebook and Twitter paywalls.
- troupo 3y ago
  > It's also not clear why Google killed Blogger. Because they kept chasing "the next big thing" aka "the next product to give me promotion inside the company". Remember Google Wave? Knoll? Plus? Orkut? Spaces? iGoogle and Sites? Slide? Jaiku? Buzz? Aardvark?... (I had to scroll through https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com to remember some of them)
pgmonstereater 3y ago
What are stack overflow spam clones?
- hnbad 3y ago
  There are various sites that seem to crawl Stack Overflow and present the content verbatim in their own UI. They're annoying because they are sometimes out of date, they generate duplicate results and they're practically uninhabited.
Quenhus 3y ago
For those on Google or DDG, here is my uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.
- chronogram 3y ago
  These filters are light enough that they work well in Manifest V3 adblockers. The "Google - Global" filter only adds 1376 dynamic rules for example.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Is there a good list of spammy sites for uBlock Origin?
benabbottnz 3y ago
> The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones Absolutely. I have a browser extension installed specifically to block domains that are this type of spam from my Google search results, and I’m adding to it almost weekly. Come on Google, you’re seriously ranking that as front page worthy?
lucidyan 3y ago
> The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. I recommend this userscript https://github.com/vladgba/Back2source https://github.com/vladgba/Back2source for avoiding Stackexchange clones, it saved me a lot of time.
moneywoes 3y ago
May I ask which filter list you are using?

xbkingx 3y ago

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users. When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, and abandoned). If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.

cout 3y ago
I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.
- Quekid5 3y ago
  Yup, same for me. It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)
  - wpietri 3y ago
    Totally. Advertising is fundamentally about distracting someone so you can put money in your pocket without regard to the impact on that someone. I have a lot of complaints about, say, McDonald's, but they make their money through giving people something of value to them. Advertising legitimizes the making of money in a way unrelated to value delivery. (The same is true about a lot of finance.) When you combine that with up-and-to-the-right numerical goals and standard executive incentives, over time you pretty much guarantee what Doctorow calls "enshittification". Delivering value becomes at best a side effect of the system.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Aren't McDonald's one of the biggest advertisers in the world? They sell poor quality food on the basis of brand recognition.
      - praptak 3y ago
        That's unrelated to the point GP is making. The point is that they are not incentivized to put poison into burgers to get money from the poison industry.
        courseofaction 3y ago
        Well put. Ads are the poison of information.
  - LaundroMat 3y ago
    That's exactly what Brin and Page said in the paper where they presented Google... "[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" and "[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm." Both from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998)
- paradox460 3y ago
  I've used uBlocklist to filter these things since Google removed that feature
Animats 3y ago
Yes. We can point to the exact moment in time when Google turned to the dark side. It was on August 9, 2006, when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, addressed the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] This was the moment that SEO, now officially endorsed by Google's CEO, became respectable. Until then, SEO was considered to be a branch of the spam industry. There were conferences such as the Web Search Spam Squashing Summit in 2005 on how to kill it. [1] https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html
- AdamN 3y ago
  There was/is whitehat SEO: properly creating links to relevant content within a site, using keywords that help bots find relevant content, traversing your own site to make sure there aren't dead zones with content that will never be found. Google should have leaned into just this small segment of tooling and done much more of a ban hammer on the bad actors. They didn't and a bunch of people have left. I use DuckDuckGo mostly and sometimes Google but never by default. I don't even like DDG that much but it's good enough.
- eastbound 3y ago
  SEO sends the message that you have a content writer, and, thus, that you are a well established business (The content that is required to be produced is more nefarious than having hamster marketing guys spin in wheels, but the nature of the work is irrelevant to Google).
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  [dead]
- nine_k 3y ago
  > web rings and link indexes The popular "Awesome ${whatever}" collections are very much that, link indexes for relatively narrow areas. Curation matters. This is something computers are still bad at, or are too expensive to deploy for a mass-market service.
  - anotheruser13 3y ago
collaborative 3y ago
I am trying something different that might work for you with aisearch.vip The challenge will be staying true to not showing ads, respecting user privacy, and not requiring a subscription. So far, the only thing that works is free daily quota + pre-paid
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  [dead]
pupppet 3y ago
Oh man can you imagine Yahoo, playing the long game, brings back their user-managed indexes and becomes the dominant search engine again.
- DougN7 3y ago
  Brilliant idea!
- wintermutestwin 3y ago
  Until ChatGPT came along, I figured it was inevitable that human curated search came back into ascendancy as the crawler model has become such a failure. Now we can use ChatGPT to filter through Google's infested mess, but this double edged Sword of Damocles will be able to create infinite attempts to bury genuine content with ad spam.
- drpixie 3y ago
  You might have stumbled onto a practical and useful application of LLMs. Yahoo (or whoever) could crawl the web, categorise each page, and provide a genuine "Index". Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) I've always felt that an index by subject would be more useful than string-match based searching. Of course, the index might rank links within each sub-sub--sub-sub...category with something like the original page-rank. Now if Yahoo (or whoever) could avoid the enshitification trap ... imagine what a fabulous resource that could be.
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    > Like in the back of a book, or an old subject based card catalogue ... Dewy-decimalise the web :) Now that is an awesome idea. I really do think we need to have category-based indexing as well as page search.
- symonda 3y ago
  This is an interesting point. User managed or curated indices offer unique advantages, especially when 'depth of coverage' is more important than 'breadth of coverage'. I believe that we are witnessing people shift away from demanding 'search breadth' as we speak, so someone might possibly decide to do this.
pentagrama 3y ago
I think that there are current SEO practices that make sense that a search engine uses as a ranking signal, like accessibility (mobile friendliness, screen reader compatibility, +), time to load (performance, image optimization, no js bloat), security (https), no stuff appearing on top the content (modals), use of h tags and breadcrumbs to order content, srucured data for bots and more. Of course people game the system, apply shady practices, sell courses with tips. It is a nuance topic, the name now is bastardized by marketing companies doing shady things, but on his core is just practices to create good websites and provide a good user experience
flyinghamster 3y ago
> If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s. Unfortunately, there's no going back - the closest we can get is BBS-via-SSH. The entire landline phone infrastructure is crumbling around us (or in many cases, completely gone). Voice calls are packet-switched now, rather than circuit-switched as in the past. The upshot is, fancy modulation techniques that made full-duplex 33.6k possible over voice-grade connections aren't going to work, and even good old Bell 103 (300 baud) may end up being problematic. I'm not sure I can even get new landline phone service, and if so, it's going to be expensive - and the wire plant is an unmaintained mess. When I got my folks off their landline and onto VoIP some years back, their old landline had so much hum it was nearly unusable. Once the inside wiring was disconnected from the landline and connected to an ATA, the hum was gone. It wasn't our wiring.

nikanj 3y ago

I always have a feeling they could get surprisingly far by having one person doing random searches, then tagging all the obvious spam to be deindexed. But Google is very adamant about never hiring a person to do a job well, if AI can be trained to do the same job badly

stevenicr 3y ago
Don't they have whole teams of people looking at sites through the lens of the leaked 'quality rater guidelines' - ? I thought it was like a few thousand people in the philippines downranking sites for thousands of reasons - without being transparent about possible biases and such. Maybe I'm thinking of somewhere else. And wasn't there a story about a bunch people who were doing similar as 1099 contractors in the US striking because they were not getting a living wage or something?
- pavs 3y ago
  Looking at the quality of current google searches I highly doubt it. I mean I could single handedly remove thousands of domains in a month and improve google search result, I have a hard time believing that they have 1000s of people doing it and the quality is this shitty.
  - creato 3y ago
    They were fined 2.4 billion euros for downranking a shitty SEO spam operation: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/07/google-shopping-lawsuit/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/07/google-shopping-lawsuit/am.... How many of those thousand domains will result in billion dollar fines?
    - _v7gu 3y ago
      Wow, that is not what that article is saying at all.
      - creato 3y ago

redsaber 3y ago

> There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. Oh I did use ublacklist which mixes blocking in both of the google search and the google image search. But curious what is the filter you have in your uBlock origin?

Quenhus 3y ago
I'm not OP, but here is my own uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
- redsaber 3y ago
  thank you!
- redsaber 3y ago
  thanks

QuantumGood 3y ago

You can use the AdGuard Annoyances list in the uBlock Origin settings to block certain types of content. This includes blocking cookie scripts that pop up every time you opt out of non-essential cookies. It also has an unbreak filter list that, when used in combination with EasyList, can remove anti-adblock warnings .

tacker2000 3y ago

Yea why cant i just remove these spammy Stack Overflow clones. Its wasting me precious time whenever I need some answers. Seems like such an easy feature but yea Google already lost its way a long time ago…

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I googled something. One of the results was "title (recommended)". That should be enough for Google to ban the result.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
so Google should have a list of titles that if found cause them to ban the result, which frankly might affect people with little personal sites who aren't very good at making sites but just want to put up some stuff they really know a lot about, but anyway is there any other items in the list? I'm pretty sure SEO sites will be able to figure out don't title your page "title (recommended)".
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  When all this search engine 'things' came about websites were indexed organically. Then websites started to optimize for what Google actually parsed. Meta tags, no things behind JavaScript, semantic markup etc. And that worked really well. Stuff was easy to find. Those were the best days. There was some luring, but at least if you were looking for something technical you found it (provided it existed and was indexed). This is no longer the case. Give you an example: Any search term for Windows+Error+KB<number> is a nuclear wasteland of companies having copy-paste pages only to sell you their services at the end. Lately the same has been popping up on YouTube. Any search for an issue with formatting a harddrive lists 20 pages which sell formatting tools. A search for checking whether a certain animal is dangerous yields wildly inaccurate results just to sell me pest control. Spoiler: it was a Jerusalem Bug. You don't get a fever at all. The thing just has huge mouthparts, and that can physically hurt. When you put "(recommended)" in your title because you know it's then displayed verbatim in Google is nasty. All driven by these websites which 'recommend' things to you.

Semaphor 3y ago

> Pinterest Kagi recently released a leaderboard for per-domain customization: https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png https://i.imgur.com/ViLamx7.png They are 2nd for "lowered" and first for "blocked".

buro9 3y ago
Well that's a feature that I might be willing to pay for. Add Twitter to that list and I'll start finding accessible content again.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  They have block/lower/raise/pin for domains, and additionally, they support regex rewriting of domain names, all my twitter results on Kagi redirect to nitter (though I don’t know if that still works, I was gone last week)
  - yosito 3y ago
    Ohhh regex rewriting for domain names? I'm a paying customer for two months but I hadn't discovered that feature yet. Thanks!
Llamamoe 3y ago
Kagi is amazing but the costs are very non-negligible. :F
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I agree, but then I have very few subscriptions, so there's space in the budget ;)
- traverseda 3y ago
  More than 1.5 cents per search is a lot, they're pricing model really discourages me from making them my default search engine. A $10 unlimited search would be more justifiable. $15 would be stretching it. If I'm not on a functionally unlimited unlimited plan (rate limiting is fine if it's reasonable) then I have to think about it every time I search. Should I really be searching here or should I be using the search box on stackoverflow or github or Wikipedia? Just introduces some constan cognitive frisson to the experience.

sjkdfkjdsfhjkhs 3y ago

It's also not clear why Google killed Blogger. More investment in Blogger with better linking between blogs (the way you can @someone on Twitter) and discovery (#tag searches allowing you to see posts from multiple blogs, curated blogrolls), more realtime/live logging functionality, easy microblogging functionality, etc. would probably have led to a lot more content existing on Google owned spaces, as opposed to being siloed behind Facebook and Twitter paywalls.

troupo 3y ago
> It's also not clear why Google killed Blogger. Because they kept chasing "the next big thing" aka "the next product to give me promotion inside the company". Remember Google Wave? Knoll? Plus? Orkut? Spaces? iGoogle and Sites? Slide? Jaiku? Buzz? Aardvark?... (I had to scroll through https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com to remember some of them)

pgmonstereater 3y ago

What are stack overflow spam clones?

hnbad 3y ago
There are various sites that seem to crawl Stack Overflow and present the content verbatim in their own UI. They're annoying because they are sometimes out of date, they generate duplicate results and they're practically uninhabited.

Quenhus 3y ago

For those on Google or DDG, here is my uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub/StackOverflow copycats: https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.

chronogram 3y ago
These filters are light enough that they work well in Manifest V3 adblockers. The "Google - Global" filter only adds 1376 dynamic rules for example.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Is there a good list of spammy sites for uBlock Origin?

benabbottnz 3y ago

> The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones Absolutely. I have a browser extension installed specifically to block domains that are this type of spam from my Google search results, and I’m adding to it almost weekly. Come on Google, you’re seriously ranking that as front page worthy?

lucidyan 3y ago

> The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google. I recommend this userscript https://github.com/vladgba/Back2source https://github.com/vladgba/Back2source for avoiding Stackexchange clones, it saved me a lot of time.

moneywoes 3y ago

May I ask which filter list you are using?