We need an addon to exclude content-farms from search results

3 points by id122015 ↗ HN
Aren't you fed up lately with all the noise you get when searching for something? I mean, people do have the right to express freely, but when I search for something, I'd like to limit the results to types of sites like Wikipedia, Goodreads, Medium, but exclude all the Wordpress, blogging platforms, anything that a kid,can setup, because the've read somewhere that if they write content for words people search, they'll get rich. Lets separate the natural from the monetization greed. We have an AdBlock list. We need a FarmBlock list.

I forgot to say, they want to write content not because they have something to say but because thet want to target the first result on your first search page.

1 comment

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Totally! I think people need to get their heads around the fact that Google...sucks at search. It really does. Try searching for a Grammarly review – you'll get nothing but affiliates / content farms who are making a commission on Grammarly sales.

It's very often the case that the first page of search results are all from the same website, usually the company behind the term or brand, which is not what we want most of the time. For example, a lot of searches on AWS will return nothing but Amazon pages. We should get one or two links to Amazon's AWS pages, and the rest should be third-party reviews, how-tos, and so forth.

I think Google's algorithmic approach to search might be overwrought, overengineered, and beatable by fundamentally different approaches. Right now, the results suck. Ironically, I think what most users are after in most searches would be best satisfied by a web index, like Yahoo used to be in the 90s, not by Google's algorithmic approach.