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Blocked Sites is discontinued
- bittermang 14y agoNot surprising, as the feature hasn't worked for quite some time, despite still being available to configure within your settings. I am disappointed however, because there are quite a few sites on the Internet that I would much rather not see at all, ever again. They are the noise in my search for signal in my Google search results. And the entire point of switching to Google way back in the day was the quality of their search results versus what was available in the late 90s. Being able to personally fine tune those results myself, outside of what a robot thought to "personally" customize my experience to, was a great feature. Suggesting I use a third party plugin for a browser I don't use is hardly a compromise or a solution, and does nothing for my Google search results on mobile platforms where that plugin is not now nor will likely ever be available.
- Shank 14y agoPersonal Blacklist is an official Google extension, it just doesn't sync with anything or save to a database. At least for my purposes, I don't need it anywhere but my desktop machine to help out in result pruning (experts exchange, fixya). Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of its shutdown.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoAre you logged in? There is a link at the bottom of the page to download it. It isn't very prominent; I almost missed it.
- lukeholder 14y agoim not getting it either: http://d.pr/i/CMx0 http://d.pr/i/CMx0
- shurcooL 14y agoNeither am I. Could it be because I don't have any sites blocked? It's either that, or a bug... And I can't really know which.
- zorlem 14y ago>Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of its shutdown. After you go to that link and read the notification, there is another link to download the blocklist as a plain-text file. Mine contained a number of domains I've added during the years. It's quite interesting to see all the domains I've blocked so far :)
- elmofromok 14y agoMine was surprisingly short.. www.w3schools.com
- hackerboos 14y agoWell I had all those sites that scrape StackOverflow added to my list. I love that SO uses a CC license but it does have some unintended consequences.
- vwinsyee 14y agoIs there a public list of such site? I think I'd find it quite useful (for my own blocking).
- hackerboos 14y agoI don't think there is. I did it on a case-by-case basis.
- oe 14y agoThey also use these domains: w3schools.com ww.w3schools.com wwww.w3schools.com Probably others too.
- anotherbadlogin 14y ago"experts exchange, fixya" HA, yes, not being able to block these assholes really degrades Google's search results. Not to mention the dozens of spam sites re-hosting Stack Overflow content embedded in a sea of ads. GJ, Google. You suck at marketing basically everything, and now you've degraded the one thing you did right. And this is just Google's latest offense. They already degraded their product by eliminating the ability to put "+" in front of a term to require it in results. I might actually look at Bing now.
- weareconvo 14y agoI can't even count the number of times I've attempted to block every variant of "w3schools".
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- brokentone 14y agoThis really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange results again. Why is Google shutting every secondary project/feature down right now? Reader, labs, blocked sites, code search... Any engineers able to weigh in on how this is affecting innovation or the 80/20 policy?
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- ollysb 14y agoI think they were just crowdsourcing the pruning effort. I don't have experts exchange blocked and I haven't seen it appear in my results for months.
- brokentone 14y agoInteresting theory, and genius if that's what they were doing with it. However, pulling it back off the market makes it look as though they failed at this.
- zem 14y agoor that they succeeded well enough that they no longer need additional data. note from the description of the panda algorithm [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda] "Google Panda affects the ranking of an entire site or a specific section rather than just the individual pages on a site."
- deelowe 14y agoExperts exchange stopped showing up in the results back when Google released the new indexing engine over a year ago. You should be fine.
- brokentone 14y agoThanks for the update! I'm less concerned now.
- factorialboy 14y agoMakes sense to me. I'd rather have my browser know what results I don't want, than Google. However it is Google that provides me a browser (for free) bundled with a sync feature. Anyway, goodbye W3Schools! :)
- chacha102 14y agoThis feature has been discontinued for a few months now. I'm surprised nobody posted this until now. I actually have found the plugin to be mostly adequate. There aren't a ton of sites that I feel deserve to be blocked from my search results, so syncing isn't a gigantic problem. I do find it annoying that there is a link added to each and every search result to block the site, but it might be useful if I decided to be really picky about my results.
- itafroma 14y agoI thought it was discontinued a while ago as well, but it was still in limbo as of late January of this year[1]. [1]: http://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-feature-146409 http://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-feature-14640...
- ianstormtaylor 14y agoThis sucks because the Chrome extension has a noticeable lag before the results are removed. I often accidentally click on a W3Schools link before the extension kicks in, and then wonder why it even came up in results at all.
- richardv 14y agoThis feature didn't work at the best of times, and became so unreliable... I also don't believe that the blocked sites was linked to my Google account, because I had blocked sooo many different pages on W3Schools that I just abandoned using the blocked sites feature altogether.
- Encosia 14y ago> To block particular sites from your search results, we recommend the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension from Google. Because, you know, everyone using Google also uses Chrome and only uses it on one device.
- benatkin 14y agoI think they're implying that you should switch to Chrome. They've shown notices to people running the latest version of Firefox that they should consider upgrading to Chrome on search pages before.
- Spone 14y agoDoes someone know of a Firefox extension achieving the same result? EDIT: just found this Greasemonkey script https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156 https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156
- defrndr 14y agoNo solutions for people not using Chrome?
- johnpowell 14y agoI found this greasemonkey script and it seems to do the trick. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95205 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95205
- just2n 14y agoI understand this from a technical perspective, but I always thought this feature had the potential to allow Google to gather better qualitative metrics about websites. For instance, if a huge chunk of people who are searching for web-related questions (end up on SO or MDN or something) and they all have ExpertSexChange and w3schools blocked, then perhaps those should be considered qualitatively worse and would therefore be ranked lower than the alternatives? I guess not. I'm curious how they're determining quality in that case. Hey Bing, maybe you could pick this up and deliver quality results over faster results?
- notatoad 14y agoi'm sure that was the original intention, and the reason for the discontinuation is that nobody used it and the cost of maintaining the feature exceeded the value of the data they gathered from it. (or else everybody blocked the same few things in the first couple weeks the feature was available, and then they stopped learning anything from the feature)
- just2n 14y agoPerhaps, but when useful features see lack of use, it's usually because it's a prohibitively difficult feature to use or very poorly presented. Maybe if it was as simple as clicking a "never see results from this website again" it would've seen orders of magnitude more use and been far more useful. Perhaps an upvote/downvote system? Seems like these are relatively tiny time investments by a couple of engineers and would serve to massively increase the quality of results. Not sure why throwing useful features away is a better decision.
- firebrand39 14y agoA very good thing is the minus sign in google search. It allows you to exclude keywords and sites. They should expand that. My searchbar gets very crowded at times.
- monkeyfacebag 14y agoI guess I need to go back to manually appending "mdn" to all my html/css/js-related queries. How much longer is w3schools going to stay at the top of those results? EDIT: Actually, it turns out I've been using the linked Chrome extension (went to install, discovered it was already installed). I just conflated the two services and forgot about the extension. So to make this productive, I recommend this extension. I haven't seen w3schools in months.
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- gee_totes 14y ago/me straightens DuckDuckGo independent evangelist hat and nervously rings doorbell "Judging from your comment, you sound like the perfect user for Duck Duck Go! If you set DDG as the default browser for chrome/ff, you can search mdn with just '!mdn foo'. Also at your fingertips is searching !jquery (and hundreds of other search shortcuts) DuckDuckGo is great and makes searching super productive!" /me smiles eagerly
- esbwhat 14y agoCan I ask you why you see DDG as the perfect alternative to google? One would think that if you are concerned with the sort of things google is doing, you would bank on an open source search engine, so this sort of thing doesn't just repeat itself.
- gee_totes 14y agoBecause there is less typing to do searches. As a developer, I only have a limited number of keystrokes in me before I run out and die.
- LukeShu 14y agoI have both YaCy and Seeks (distributed open source search engines) in my FF search bar, but the results are really... disappointing. I just get good results with DDG. DDG's commitment to privacy and not bubbling, etc. I do not believe are going away, it's their biggest selling point. Besides, as long as RMS is demanding that DDG be the default search engine in the GNU web browser, it's good enough for me.
- hackernewbie 14y agoFor god's sake. I literally just started using it for W3Schools about two months ago. It costs google practically nothing to do that, and now they suggest adding another extension to chew out yet more of my memory. Plus it looks like they aren't going to adhere to the implications of having a number of users blocking a site. cough w3schools.
- darkstalker 14y agoI just noticed w3schools appearing again in my search results.. well this is the cause.
- cabirum 14y agoI wonder when will Google discontinue Gmail and offer to download all mail in a file.
- taxonomyman 14y agoYou can remove up to the top ones million sites with MillionShort: http://millionshort.com/about.html http://millionshort.com/about.html and you can specify individual sites to remove via settings: http://millionshort.com/settings.php http://millionshort.com/settings.php
- ebbv 14y agoRemoving a feature that fixes a major shortcoming of your product (spam sites) and directing your customers to use an extension to fix it is awful. What faith I once had in Google being a company that puts users first is long gone.
- skylan_q 14y agoGoogle has been shutting down features left, right and centre. I'm left wondering: what useful thing has google done since gmail and ads?
- esbwhat 14y agowell, android
- olalonde 14y agoSelf driving cars? Android?
- Snowda 14y agoI do love my self driving car
- olalonde 14y agoWhat's your point? It's not useful because you don't have one?
- pyre 14y ago"I don't use Golang, so it doesn't count as a useful innovation!" ;-)
- Snowda 14y agoIt's not useful because nobody has one. Google have yet to "do" it. Their self driving car is as useful to anyone reading this as human teleportation right now. They're great idea's but until they are accessible in some form to the public, it is still just an idea that needs work not an innovation. I look forward to the day I can say I do have one though.
- greyman 14y agoWas that feature really that indispensable? I can usually get away by refining my search query, and more often that not, using the minus sign solves the problem.
- jonknee 14y agoBack when the Chrome plug-in shipped (it preceded Blocked Sites by a bit) I compiled an extensive list of content farms as a starting guide for people wanting less spam in their SERPs. If you're migrating over to the extension it's worth a look (and as always, any new suggestions for the list): http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farms/ http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farm...
- bitdestroyer 14y agoMy blocked sites list only had one entry: experts-exchange.com
- infoman 14y agoPersonal Blocklist(by me) http://crossrider.com/download/29789 http://crossrider.com/download/29789 > here an extension that works with firefox and google chrome (and maybe with some version of ie) > currently only block w3schools and expert-exchange :-) > will be extendable soon it is not on the browser marktplaces right now, so you kind of got to install it manually.
- ScottWhigham 14y agoWhat disturbs me is how it's okay for Google to allow this "for Chrome users only" but it's a $700m fine for Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer into the OS. Is Microsoft really more of a monopoly than Google? Of course not. It's ridiculous that MSFT gets fined such high amounts but no one questions Google's ethics or says, "Hey, wait a minute..."
- icebraining 14y agoComparisons to Microsoft aside, it's not true that no one questions Google. The EU antitrust authorities have been examining them for two years now, they just haven't reached a conclusion yet: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/22/eu-google-idUSL6N0BM4JI20130222 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/22/eu-google-idUSL6N0...
- ScottWhigham 14y agoSorry - I misspoke. I meant "no one questions Google in this thread".
- bane 14y agoI'm curious how all this "wood putting" is affecting staff attrition/layoffs. If had invested my work into one of the major cut projects, I'd be fuming as an employee right now. Also, it's interesting how many of the cut services seem to be around working, but slowly decaying and abandoned projects. It says something about google's ability to keep working on and developing products...especially since most of their products are essentially public betas.
- Daiz 14y agoAs many others, I used this mainly to block w3schools from my searches. Disappointing to see it go.
- robryan 14y agoI don't understand why this was discontinued. Surely this data would be a gold mine in improving the quality of search results, which is core to what Google does.
- lazugod 14y agoA blacklist that can be added to anonymously and unaccountably is not something you want affecting search results.
- robryan 14y agoSure it is, obviously you don't take any small amount of blocks as a signal. By getting a significant amount though and looking at each persons block list to normalize there blocks I think it would be useful.
- badgar 14y ago> Sure it is, obviously you don't take any small amount of blocks as a signal. You do realize spammers are extremely good generating large amounts of things, right? > By getting a significant amount though and looking at each persons block list to normalize there blocks I think it would be useful. Spammers are also very good (though not great) at adding innocuous data alongside their spam to look like real users. You don't realize it, but your solution has just exploded in complexity.
- robryan 14y agoThe same thing is true of backlinks. Sure there is a point in which it may not be worth the trouble, not questioning that.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI find both its birth and death interesting. The birth because the fact that you could mark sites as spam was one of the early talking points at Blekko, the back end architecture of our engine includes a 'selector' mechanism (slashtags) and maintaining a personal 'spam' slash tag came along for free. Its one of the features I continue to use. And then it showed up as a feature in Google's results which I found interesting because having worked at Google and had the 'deeper than non-Googlers, not as deep as someone in the search group' classes on how the two services that made up Google search at the time, I had a feel for how much lubricant it would take to squeeze that feature into the existing pipeline. It made me wonder if Google was following us :-) The death of it is also interesting, because having it in the browser as a plug-in vs the results means two things; You can't offer it as a service to your partners, and you can't know apriori if you're sending junk. If Blekko's partners say "We'd like to use your index but we don't want any results that include x,y or z" we can do that but that is at the API level with results coming right out of the index filtered by a 'negative' slashtag, but its unclear if anyone can (or does) use Google's index in that way (unlike BOSS for example). On the browser side, since you don't know what the plug-in is going to kill, how do you select the 10 documents to send? It makes me wonder that if you're doing a search in a highly contested search (like 'weight loss') and Google can't know that the 10 blue links it is about to send you are all spam (and on really contested keywords this is not uncommon) are you left with just sponsored links and no organic results? 'Panda' update all you want, even Google now admits they are adding staff to curate results (Microsoft/Bing had already gone public with their 'editor's choice' announcement). This is a good thing, but it only covers half the situation. At Blekko we got flamed by a user for not having any 'alternative' medicine sites in our 'health' slashtag, which started a conversation with that user about creating their own slashtag with all of those web sites that were unfairly penalized by the medical establishment just because their methods and claims weren't the product of some 'big pharma' company. But they could (and I believe they did) create a slashtag of all those 'hidden' sites and they got great search results for them. Reinforcing to me and others that 'spam' can be relative, and really it has two sides, user and index. So pondering this move on Google's part makes for interesting reading.
- Shank 14y agoI think it'd be illogical for Google not to in some ways compete with alternatives, like Blekko in this case. Google's core business is search, and in the early days, it was this very naive behavior that allowed Google to sneak right under places like Inktomi. Just because a search engine starts small doesn't mean it can't gain traction or market, and if it has compelling enough features, it'll happen in a heartbeat. I suggest reading "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglass Edwards - the early chapters describe a lot of Google's anxiety of being killed by other search engines for one reason or another. It helps to explain why they'd be quick to adopt new strategies to keep results fresh.
- NicoSchweinzer 14y agoI wonder how long it takes till someone comes up with "Blockedsitesly" ^^
- alainbryden 14y agoI don't remember using this feature much, but when I downloaded my block list this is what I found: www.teachexcel.com craftkeys.com softwaretopic.informer.com www.telerik.com eggheadcafe.com www.kaboodle.com bigresource.com Damn those aggregator sites are annoying.
- mathnode 14y agoI know it fucking is! Which is why I am seeing Experts Exchange (a tall claim), ahead of Stackoverflow!
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoNote that you can continue to use the Chrome extension to block sites, which I believe we rolled out before this feature. Get it at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... And here's the blog post we did about the Chrome extension: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-block-sites-from.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-...
- emilv 14y agoInterestingly enough this means you have to install software on your own computer to get better search results from a company that tries to deliver a hosted ("cloud") service. Seems backwards to me.
- anigbrowl 14y agoWell, I'm with Matt on this one. When blocklist rolled out people were stressing about having their blocked selections stored in the cloud, blocking rings to kill competing sites and so on. I think it makes sense to build that functionality in at the client end.
- jmillikin 14y agoDoes the extension remove results before they are sent to the client? In other words, if a result page has ten results and three of them are blocked, will I see seven or ten result boxes on my screen? Client-side spam blocking has been available for years. The primary advantage of having spam-blocking integrated into the search engine is that the user sees a full page of results for their query, even if some results were filtered out. If the Chrome extension supports server-side filtering, then it must be sending some sort of "exclude results from these sites" message to google.com. It would be very nice if the message format was documented and official, even if it's something as simple as a JSON list. That would allow extension developers to add support to other major browsers, especially Firefox.
- calebegg 14y ago
- rodrigoavie 14y agoThis really sucks. As said above, it wasn't working anyway. Too bad it happened. I wonder if Google could've gained more knowledge about the common "undesired" results and use it to improve the search.
- jmomo 14y agoI came for the horror comments about experts-exchange.com and was not disappointed. At least two of you have mentioned it!
- nonamegiven 14y agoSo they'll tailor search results for you personally based on what they think you'll want (or, eventually on what they want you to want), but they won't let you declare what you don't want?
- neya 14y agoWhy is this even news? This was announced long time ago and I thought it was fairly evident. Use personal blocklist, instead.
- megri 14y agoI think people do not use this feature. I have not used in last two years