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Show HN: Google search blacklist

119 points by jhchen ↗ HN
Yesterday the top upvoted comment for "Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057772 was adding personal domain blacklists. I offered to build this if there was enough interest so here's a minimum viable product for Chrome (Firefox soon to follow): https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbckmoknagndlhjbeohb. Your feedback is welcome!

31 comments

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andre3k1
Thanks Jason! Excellent concept. Is there any way that I or others can help?
jhchen
Thanks I'll be adding it to Github later today as soon as the code is in presentable form ;)
ramanujam
Great initiative. Having a "Add domain to blacklist" option on right click would be a nice addition.

I seriously wish this matures well like Adblock Plus. Imagine having a crowd sourced blacklist of domains and users can easily add it to the extension. (similar to easy filter based on geographic locations for adblock)

danilocampos
Couldn't agree more. This basic piece of functionality has almost more potential power than AdBlock Plus, given how ubiquitous search has become in every day web use, and how awful spam is becoming in the process.
stevefink
Great idea - would just require some sort of moderation in that format though. I'd much rather manage my own list of domains to blacklist. A crowd sourced one I fear could be exploited and prevent me from seeing content I'd otherwise like to be able to find.
ramanujam
Yes, moderation is definitely necessary. For instance, easylist for adblock which has over 10000 filters is maintained by five people and is updated with input from the forum members.
adrianbye
any search blacklist needs to include experts exchange as a basic default (perhaps the basic list can be disabled as necessary).

its mindblowing google hasn't done this yet

bpd1069
A smaller iteration would be the ability to import/export your black lists.
raz0r
Thanks so much. This looks very, very promising.
veb
That's awesome man! Keep up with the good work. It's definitely people like you that keep the Internet fun. :-)
yanw
Google's official spam reporting extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...
benologist
Does that actually go anywhere or is it like all their other official channels of communication?
Matt_Cutts
Yes, clicking "Report spam" in the Chrome extension goes to our official spam report page and autopopulates the spam report form with that result.
jacobian
... and then what happens?
Matt_Cutts
Two things: first, the data is used to improve our algorithms. Second, spam reports get 4x the weighting when we prioritize sites for manual spam investigation. That does mean that if you do a spam report on a page/site that only gets seen (say) once every six months, it might not get looked at on the manual side though, simply because there are other sites that are hurting users more.

Giving spam reports 4x the weight compared to the sites that we autodetect is how we try to balance responding to outside feedback with spending our review cycles on the spam that impacts users most.

adrianbye
glad you're reading this thread matt.. maybe its time to give us both private and crowdsourced blacklists?

experts exchange and ehow need to be gone by now and the data will be incredibly useful for your search quality

[dead] ChuckN
I don't necessarily want to report a garbage website as spam - it's just garbage for me. Anyway, the 'Report Spam' link doesn't always appear for me.
danilocampos
Really badass piece of work, Jason, thank you for taking a bite out of this problem. Simple, effective.

Some gravy on top would be an in-line blacklist button beside search results but even spending thirty seconds to set up the blacklist in advance gives you a Google that's a lot more useful than the default. Bravo, sir.

mattwdelong
Very nice, I never noticed your comment but I'm glad you posted this and followed through. I had something like this in mind and added it to my to do list after reading the same article. I'm glad you made it available first. Cheers to you!
benologist
Awesome stuff. Hope this gets big enough to warrant some further action from Google.
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pmichaud
Nice, I'll try it out over the next few days!
lhnn
You could set this up like Adblock, where sites being blacklisted are anonymously reported back to a central location. Highly blocked websites are offered to be automatically added to the blacklist when you install the extension.
mike-cardwell
Neat. Please make this extension work for other search engines too. Especially DDG!
anigbrowl
Next, I'd like to be able to share my blacklists ;-)
kenok
Any chance for a Safari extension as well?