5 ms·

Ask HN: What sites, e.g. experts-exchange.com, would you remove from Google?

12 points by epi0Bauqu 17y ago

In Google's results, what useless sites do you notice coming up again and again?

compay 17y ago
Here in Argentina, if you search in Spanish, todoar.com.ar comes up in the top 10 for almost everything. I'll hand it to the owners, they know how to do SEO. The problem is there's no useful content on any of their ad-ridden pages.
jacquesm 17y ago
All the stores that have been spidered (amazon.com etc) Googles own sites (youtube.com, images.google.com, etc) All the cloaked sites (sites that will redirect you after landing, or that show you different content than they showed the search engine) All the spammers (you've already mentioned experts xchg, but there are many many more) Anything that points to or contains the word sedoparking All the crappy blogs I'm sure that google could do with several billion pages less than they index right now and their quality would shoot up.
- JshWright 17y ago
  I would argue that indexing a bunch of crap actually _improves_ the quality of Google's search. Just like trying to filter e-mail spam, the larger your spam corpus, the easier it is to differentiate between valid content and junk.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    If they did a better job on the differentiation then I would agree with you.
- petercooper 17y ago
  All the stores that have been spidered (amazon.com etc) Googles own sites (youtube.com, images.google.com, etc) I'm glad this is a hypothetical question because I find both of the above very useful. I often suffix "amazon" or "youtube" on to a search - saves me actually having to go to those sites to perform a search in most cases.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    site:amazon.com that works just fine and it would keep the rest of the search results clean.
    - petercooper 17y ago
      Doesn't quite roll off the fingers as well as amazon or wikipedia though. Anyway, those entries are as valuable as anything else. If I'm searching for the title of a book, why shouldn't stores that sell the book come up? It sounds like some people in this thread would prefer non-profit communist Google, rather than a proper search engine.
FreeRadical 17y ago
mahalo
- timcederman 17y ago
  and WikiAnswers (aka a huge number of seed questions and no answers).
AhmadH 17y ago
about.com
- KWD 17y ago
  I actually find About.com useful at times. However, an About.com site that is no more than a spam site is Consumer Search. Sad that such a site is owned by the NY Times.
skolor 17y ago
Its funny you mention experts-exchange. Whenever I see that as a search result, its usually a relief. I have yet to see an experts-exchange page that did not have the information I was looking for on it, even though they do make it rather difficult to find (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the actual answer). Compared to the huge number of real spam sites that usually come up when search for technology related questions, like all of those mailing-list archives/mirrors, and the huge number of pages that ripped old forum content, experts-exchange is amazing. I can't really think of any pages I would want removed. I would like to see better pages for a lot of products, but that seems to have more to do with the manufacturers simply not creating the pages than with Google. Search results for physical goods seem to be fairly lacking, its always hard to find information about them and not just stores selling them.
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  I think a lot of people don't realize the answers are at the bottom, so they click on the link, see the request to register/pay to see the posts, and immediately back up, cursing the pseudo-paywall.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    I've seen people say this before - how do you mean "at the bottom". Every page I have seen highlights the "accepted answer" in green and does ask you to pay to access it..... am I missing a workaround?
    - aristus 17y ago
      Their ploy changes sometimes, but the answer is always there on the page somewhere. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Apple/Operating_Systems/OS_X/Q_22669414.html http://www.experts-exchange.com/Apple/Operating_Systems/OS_X... If you scroll down a bit it says "answer is available to premium members". But the page would not rank on Google if it didn't have actual content. Scroll all the way to the very bottom of the page. (APPLE-DOWNARROW on Mac) Bingo.
KWD 17y ago
I've often thought that if you removed any site that uses Google Adsense you'd get much better results.
JshWright 17y ago
Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to whip up an extension (or just a greasemonkey script) to append "-site:blah.com" entries to all google searches, according to a user defined list. In fact, I'd be surprised if such an extension didn't already exist (I'm not interested enough to go look...)
- devicenull 17y ago
  The "Customize Google" extension does this
pert 17y ago
The price comparison sites that don't contain reviews but do manage to come high up in a Google search for 'X reviews'.
Mankhool 17y ago
If Google won't filter the garbage out of the results why doesn't someone build something that will, for example, instantly remove any webpage that hasn't been updated since 1999 etc.etc. Off topic yes, but I find most of the sites that come up, well, useless.
viraptor 17y ago
swik.net - For some reason I see it's "search" pages every day in search results. Put two protocol names together, or a language + protocol and you're almost guaranteed to get it in the second place :/ scribd - They hide your search phrases somewhere in the page, so that you can think you've found exactly what you were looking for. But all you get is some random, slightly related book that doesn't help you at all.
prakash 17y ago
1. Sites which are useless for everyone e.g.: splogs, etc. 2. Some sites could be useful for a few, while being completely useless for the rest i.e. letting users remove certain sites from their results only 3. Like the ad-block software, people could subscribe to well-defined popular lists to get started. 4. I would also segment by verticals. E.g.:when you do a people search, you could bucket results into: a.) sites where the user, him/her self has entered the info - linkedin, facebook type websites b.) sites where a community has created a profile - wikipedia c.) sites that inteliigently crawl other sites and present the info -- lead411 , pipl, zoominfo, spoke, etc are useless to me
bhseo 17y ago
I have been compiling a list of useless sites to share with the world. You will need CustomizeGoogle for Firefox or your own userscript in the browser of your choice. Come to think of it, I might even create some userscripts/plugins for other browsers to go with my useless website list. If you'd like to contribute your own lists or userscripts, let me know.
- bhseo 17y ago
  Here is an example from my list, I call this the "site info" category. http://*.aboutus.org/* http://*.aboutus.org/* http://www.quantcast.com/* http://www.quantcast.com/* http://www.websiteoutlook.com/* http://www.websiteoutlook.com/* http://www.xomreviews.com/* http://www.xomreviews.com/* http://www.statbrain.com/* http://www.statbrain.com/* http://www.alexa.com/data/* http://www.alexa.com/data/* http://searchanalytics.compete.com/* http://searchanalytics.compete.com/* http://builtwith.com/?* http://builtwith.com/?* http://*.compete.com/* http://*.compete.com/* http://www.who.is/* http://www.who.is/*
jusob 17y ago
All my competitors :-)
- kingsley_20 17y ago
  I would not do that :-)
scumola 17y ago
I have my own 'custom' search engine that filters out those annoying sites. You can use it here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015394218516616598090:kmqdbzcdieu http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015394218516616598090:kmqd...
hdx 17y ago
I wish I had known the experts-exchange "hack" before...
udfalkso 17y ago
I actually wrote myself a greasemonkey script to hide results from w3schools once upon a time. I'll try to dig it up. Their docs are almost always missing the one piece of information I actually want (usually a function definition) and they nearly always rank very highly for such queries.

12 points by epi0Bauqu 17y ago

In Google's results, what useless sites do you notice coming up again and again?

Here in Argentina, if you search in Spanish, todoar.com.ar comes up in the top 10 for almost everything. I'll hand it to the owners, they know how to do SEO. The problem is there's no useful content on any of their ad-ridden pages.

jacquesm 17y ago

All the stores that have been spidered (amazon.com etc) Googles own sites (youtube.com, images.google.com, etc) All the cloaked sites (sites that will redirect you after landing, or that show you different content than they showed the search engine) All the spammers (you've already mentioned experts xchg, but there are many many more) Anything that points to or contains the word sedoparking All the crappy blogs I'm sure that google could do with several billion pages less than they index right now and their quality would shoot up.

JshWright 17y ago
I would argue that indexing a bunch of crap actually _improves_ the quality of Google's search. Just like trying to filter e-mail spam, the larger your spam corpus, the easier it is to differentiate between valid content and junk.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  If they did a better job on the differentiation then I would agree with you.
petercooper 17y ago
All the stores that have been spidered (amazon.com etc) Googles own sites (youtube.com, images.google.com, etc) I'm glad this is a hypothetical question because I find both of the above very useful. I often suffix "amazon" or "youtube" on to a search - saves me actually having to go to those sites to perform a search in most cases.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  site:amazon.com that works just fine and it would keep the rest of the search results clean.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    Doesn't quite roll off the fingers as well as amazon or wikipedia though. Anyway, those entries are as valuable as anything else. If I'm searching for the title of a book, why shouldn't stores that sell the book come up? It sounds like some people in this thread would prefer non-profit communist Google, rather than a proper search engine.

FreeRadical 17y ago

mahalo

timcederman 17y ago
and WikiAnswers (aka a huge number of seed questions and no answers).

AhmadH 17y ago

about.com

KWD 17y ago
I actually find About.com useful at times. However, an About.com site that is no more than a spam site is Consumer Search. Sad that such a site is owned by the NY Times.

skolor 17y ago

Its funny you mention experts-exchange. Whenever I see that as a search result, its usually a relief. I have yet to see an experts-exchange page that did not have the information I was looking for on it, even though they do make it rather difficult to find (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the actual answer). Compared to the huge number of real spam sites that usually come up when search for technology related questions, like all of those mailing-list archives/mirrors, and the huge number of pages that ripped old forum content, experts-exchange is amazing. I can't really think of any pages I would want removed. I would like to see better pages for a lot of products, but that seems to have more to do with the manufacturers simply not creating the pages than with Google. Search results for physical goods seem to be fairly lacking, its always hard to find information about them and not just stores selling them.

Xichekolas 17y ago
I think a lot of people don't realize the answers are at the bottom, so they click on the link, see the request to register/pay to see the posts, and immediately back up, cursing the pseudo-paywall.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  I've seen people say this before - how do you mean "at the bottom". Every page I have seen highlights the "accepted answer" in green and does ask you to pay to access it..... am I missing a workaround?
  - aristus 17y ago
    Their ploy changes sometimes, but the answer is always there on the page somewhere. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Apple/Operating_Systems/OS_X/Q_22669414.html http://www.experts-exchange.com/Apple/Operating_Systems/OS_X... If you scroll down a bit it says "answer is available to premium members". But the page would not rank on Google if it didn't have actual content. Scroll all the way to the very bottom of the page. (APPLE-DOWNARROW on Mac) Bingo.

KWD 17y ago

I've often thought that if you removed any site that uses Google Adsense you'd get much better results.

JshWright 17y ago

Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to whip up an extension (or just a greasemonkey script) to append "-site:blah.com" entries to all google searches, according to a user defined list. In fact, I'd be surprised if such an extension didn't already exist (I'm not interested enough to go look...)

devicenull 17y ago
The "Customize Google" extension does this

pert 17y ago

The price comparison sites that don't contain reviews but do manage to come high up in a Google search for 'X reviews'.

Mankhool 17y ago

If Google won't filter the garbage out of the results why doesn't someone build something that will, for example, instantly remove any webpage that hasn't been updated since 1999 etc.etc. Off topic yes, but I find most of the sites that come up, well, useless.

viraptor 17y ago

swik.net - For some reason I see it's "search" pages every day in search results. Put two protocol names together, or a language + protocol and you're almost guaranteed to get it in the second place :/ scribd - They hide your search phrases somewhere in the page, so that you can think you've found exactly what you were looking for. But all you get is some random, slightly related book that doesn't help you at all.

prakash 17y ago

1. Sites which are useless for everyone e.g.: splogs, etc. 2. Some sites could be useful for a few, while being completely useless for the rest i.e. letting users remove certain sites from their results only 3. Like the ad-block software, people could subscribe to well-defined popular lists to get started. 4. I would also segment by verticals. E.g.:when you do a people search, you could bucket results into: a.) sites where the user, him/her self has entered the info - linkedin, facebook type websites b.) sites where a community has created a profile - wikipedia c.) sites that inteliigently crawl other sites and present the info -- lead411 , pipl, zoominfo, spoke, etc are useless to me

bhseo 17y ago

I have been compiling a list of useless sites to share with the world. You will need CustomizeGoogle for Firefox or your own userscript in the browser of your choice. Come to think of it, I might even create some userscripts/plugins for other browsers to go with my useless website list. If you'd like to contribute your own lists or userscripts, let me know.

bhseo 17y ago
Here is an example from my list, I call this the "site info" category. http://*.aboutus.org/* http://*.aboutus.org/* http://www.quantcast.com/* http://www.quantcast.com/* http://www.websiteoutlook.com/* http://www.websiteoutlook.com/* http://www.xomreviews.com/* http://www.xomreviews.com/* http://www.statbrain.com/* http://www.statbrain.com/* http://www.alexa.com/data/* http://www.alexa.com/data/* http://searchanalytics.compete.com/* http://searchanalytics.compete.com/* http://builtwith.com/?* http://builtwith.com/?* http://*.compete.com/* http://*.compete.com/* http://www.who.is/* http://www.who.is/*

jusob 17y ago

All my competitors :-)

kingsley_20 17y ago
I would not do that :-)

scumola 17y ago

I have my own 'custom' search engine that filters out those annoying sites. You can use it here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015394218516616598090:kmqdbzcdieu http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015394218516616598090:kmqd...

hdx 17y ago

I wish I had known the experts-exchange "hack" before...

udfalkso 17y ago

I actually wrote myself a greasemonkey script to hide results from w3schools once upon a time. I'll try to dig it up. Their docs are almost always missing the one piece of information I actually want (usually a function definition) and they nearly always rank very highly for such queries.