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Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks, at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a "caring about your users as a business
by scarmig 3y ago
Didn't Google have this feature like two decades ago (blocks, at least)? It's not quite a search innovation, more like a "caring about your users as a business strategy" innovation.
- davidmurdoch 3y agoThey did. And w3schools was in my list back then.
- scarmig 3y agoAnd can't forget about expertsexchange.
- delfinom 3y agoEven 2 decades later, you can never unsee it
- p1mrx 3y agoIt's only obvious when you format it that way. They primarily used "Experts Exchange" and http://www.experts-exchange.com/ http://www.experts-exchange.com/
- stock_toaster 3y agoand penisland
- jsnell 3y agoYes, they had it for a few years a decade ago. If you think through the feature, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public [0]. But even then it might be a great idea for a search engine that's trying to establish an initial niche. It doesn't even matter whether the idea actually works well in practice: if 100k people think that manual curation of search result domains is a high value feature and are willing to pay for it, the feature has done its job. [0] I wrote a more detailed comment on why a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294800
- cabalamat 3y ago> that's trying to establish an initial niche Which suggests to me that while kagi might be good now, if it gets popular it may undergo enshittification in an effort to monetise its popularity.
- freediverx 3y agoThat’s exactly my fear.
- pokeymcsnatch 3y agoIt's a paid service and all their competitors are 'free'. Enshittification doesn't fit their business model, they'd go under in a heartbeat.
- r00fus 3y agoAh, but then they acquired Doubleclick (or was it the other way around?) and a monopoly was formed.
- Nextgrid 3y agoPeople would use it to block all the spam sites that host copious amounts of (potentially Google's) Ads/Analytics, and since they might actually start finding what they're looking for this will reduce engagement on the search results page and with the sponsored links. This is bad for Google's bottom-line thus why such a feature was removed and will never be coming back.
- toyg 3y agoEnshittification classic.
- codezero 3y agowhen google first came out it had nothing to do with that, it was that they offered as strong algorithmic ranking in the feed. Before that the search providers ran in a few ways (by my memory): 1. Sell the first few results but make it look organic (this all happened behind closed doors and I knew a few people who paid for such results) 2. Hierarchical/topic based collections of links (This is what Yahoo was famous for in the 90s if I remember correctly, I'll keep saying that because it was a long time ago!) The whole "google cares about you" was an outcropping of the organic flocking to google because of their reliable and algorithmic results that just seemed trustworthy, they capitalized on that and it honestly lasted a lot longer than I expected before they really started being evil.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoYeah. Engineers hate when something isn’t a technical feat. The best innovations are usually software people working with the right people from other disciplines to make a thought out CRUD app.
- 7839284023 3y agoUse this: " uBlacklist is a Google Search filter for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. " https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nomat 3y agoit works for duckduckgo as well.
- alternatex 3y agoInterestingly not supported on Firefox Android. It's the first time I come across an add-on that doesn't work on both.
- deadbunny 3y agoFirefox on Android only supports a handful of curated add-ons. You can apparently create your own collections or install anything with Firefox Nightly but I've not done this.
- code-blooded 3y agoYou can do that with Firefox Beta too, which likely will give you better experience / stability. It's a shame you have to jump through so many hoops to get it working.
- sam1r 3y agoYes, but 99.9 percent of its users do not know these filters/features exist. Still don't. Google didn't prioritize it's visibility [intentioally] over the past 2 decades as well. Maybe it's time to do so. I can't imagine how tedious the process may be to make very small changes on the main google home page.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago> Yes, but 99.9 percent of its users do not know these filters/features exist. Still don't. The features you were referring to were removed a few years after they were launched.