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You used to be able to change your search settings to ban certain domains. They removed this feature and instead offloaded that functionality to a chrome extens

You used to be able to change your search settings to ban certain domains. They removed this feature and instead offloaded that functionality to a chrome extension called Personal Blocklist. It's not an ideal solution: * It only works on chrome, obviously, because it's a chrome extension. That means you will continue to get crappy results on all your other browsers and devices. * It modifies the links after you load the page so you see them disappear which can be disorienting. I really don't want those search results even making it into the DOM. * As of now I'm not able to even edit my list (the options menu item is grayed out) and I have no idea why. The quality of the extension is poor at best. * It has zero intelligence. What would be ideal is that I could subscribe to a blocklist of well known content farms and allow crowdsourcing to maintain and add to that list. The clear message from Google is that it doesn't really want to support or encourage wholesale blocking of any domains. Google would prefer to be the entity that makes that decision for you, and since these content farms make Google a lot of money don't hold your breath that they're going to start cracking down in a serious way anytime soon.

wlesieutre 12y ago
Perhaps Google doesn't want a robust blocking system because it would set off a cat-and-mouse game with the content farms continuously evolving to evade blocking? As they are, the content farms are annoying, but they're a relatively stable entity. It would get harder for Google to crawl new content on the internet because they'd be filtering through progressively more clever and aggressive farms to find real pages. I'm sure is already the case, but aggressive blocking would provoke farms into getting worse.
AJ007 12y ago
The highest earning form of advertising for a content farm is Google. The fundamental concept of a content farm is to have mountains of content about any possible topic. The only ad network with inventory deep enough to cover this is Google. The difference being single digit CPMs verse triple digit. When Google created Adsense it built an ecosystem. While other search engines lost users as soon as they clicked on a link, Google had a fairly high percentage chance that user still made them money. I don't know if the future looks much better. What Larry Page is saying that instead of display a link of Stack Overflow results he would like to scrape the answer to the query in a way the user never has to go there. The way they will make money from advertising with that model looks even worse.
dreamfactory2 12y ago
> What would be ideal is that I could subscribe to a blocklist of well known content farms and allow crowdsourcing to maintain and add to that list. You might be on to something here with censoring as a service
- mrfusion 12y ago
  Yeah, like a wikipedia for search results! I wonder if anyone has tried that. It would actually be pretty simple. A search bar. If you search doesn't exist, you're prompted to create a new page and add in whatever links you've found. Users could also vote to merge searches, etc. You'd need some major fraud detection of course but I think it would be possible. Anyone interested in working on that?
  - dreamfactory2 12y ago
    Wait a second, isn't that doing the same thing that's already automated via combination of pagerank and what google does with chrome and analytics? And for that matter isn't 'censoring as a service' what a search engine does in the first place?
    - mrfusion 12y ago
      I think that was the dream. But people are complaining about google search. Maybe it's time to try something new like crowdsourced search results.
bglazer 12y ago
Greasemonkey on Firefox has a script called "Google Hit Hider by Domain" [1]. The list of blocked sites is not easily edited, but it consistently works. Its overall utility for me is still pretty high and it has a well-polished interface. [1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95205 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95205 (looks userscripts.org is down right now)

wlesieutre 12y ago

Perhaps Google doesn't want a robust blocking system because it would set off a cat-and-mouse game with the content farms continuously evolving to evade blocking? As they are, the content farms are annoying, but they're a relatively stable entity. It would get harder for Google to crawl new content on the internet because they'd be filtering through progressively more clever and aggressive farms to find real pages. I'm sure is already the case, but aggressive blocking would provoke farms into getting worse.

AJ007 12y ago

The highest earning form of advertising for a content farm is Google. The fundamental concept of a content farm is to have mountains of content about any possible topic. The only ad network with inventory deep enough to cover this is Google. The difference being single digit CPMs verse triple digit. When Google created Adsense it built an ecosystem. While other search engines lost users as soon as they clicked on a link, Google had a fairly high percentage chance that user still made them money. I don't know if the future looks much better. What Larry Page is saying that instead of display a link of Stack Overflow results he would like to scrape the answer to the query in a way the user never has to go there. The way they will make money from advertising with that model looks even worse.

dreamfactory2 12y ago

> What would be ideal is that I could subscribe to a blocklist of well known content farms and allow crowdsourcing to maintain and add to that list. You might be on to something here with censoring as a service

mrfusion 12y ago
Yeah, like a wikipedia for search results! I wonder if anyone has tried that. It would actually be pretty simple. A search bar. If you search doesn't exist, you're prompted to create a new page and add in whatever links you've found. Users could also vote to merge searches, etc. You'd need some major fraud detection of course but I think it would be possible. Anyone interested in working on that?
- dreamfactory2 12y ago
  Wait a second, isn't that doing the same thing that's already automated via combination of pagerank and what google does with chrome and analytics? And for that matter isn't 'censoring as a service' what a search engine does in the first place?
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    I think that was the dream. But people are complaining about google search. Maybe it's time to try something new like crowdsourced search results.

bglazer 12y ago

Greasemonkey on Firefox has a script called "Google Hit Hider by Domain" [1]. The list of blocked sites is not easily edited, but it consistently works. Its overall utility for me is still pretty high and it has a well-polished interface. [1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95205 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95205 (looks userscripts.org is down right now)