I wrote this because I was so annoyed by irrelevant low-quality search results for my queries on Google. For instance if I'm looking up for Python xyz topic, 99% of the times I am not interested in some 'low-quality' content (based on my personal preferences) from website example.com.
The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
Thank you so much for this. Was looking for something similar, found only solutions that were dependent on extensions I didn't want to install due to privacy/security reasons.
Can we have the option of not showing the removed results? Or maybe just show small notification on top "some results were removed by Wiper, click here to show them"?
Otherwise some search results might still be plagued with offenders, though admittingly their presence is much more sufferable.
Apparently some people prefer the fact that the results are not fully removed. I have a better idea- to let the users decide it, so for v.1.0 I'm going to take these two ideas into account: 1. CSS-ify to suppress the results, 2. Remove them fully.
Somewhat, but it's more about explanations and implementations of common algorithms that appear in interviews etc. Unfortunately, everything outside the algorithms is very low-effort SEO content. I'd be happy excluding it from my search results and only go there when I need to look up a specific algorithm.
Precisely due to the existence of these two websites, Quora and cplusplus.com I have a custom Google search engine using a whitelist I created specifically to exclude these and include bloggers from standards committees and other people I follow
commondreams? Are you by chance browsing /r/politics? I find the most useful way to browse /r/politics is to sort by controversial because it pierces the bubble.
/r/politics is just the left version of /r/the_donald, and they're both insufferable.
I miss the niche subs with quality discussion and content, but the rest of Reddit just started overflowing there too and ruined it.
I do not regret deleting my account. Although whenever a web search returns a Reddit link, I don't have RES and old.* redirect to make the site usable any more. Don't know how anyone uses new Reddit.
You're better off just installing something like Boost or Baconreader on your phone to take care of Reddit links from searches. I haven't touched Reddit on a desktop system in over a year because it's just easier to use an app and not have to deal with the ridiculously awful redesign or fiddle with RES.
Yes, That's the one! You create a set of rules and you can publicly publish your url. I have one specifically for programming related searches and one for news.
You can have URL patterns for example:
en.cppreference.com/<asterisk>
Edit: I wasn't able to get the star to work in the post
Would there really be enough revenue to warrant doing this, considering 1) scraping and hosting that content requires some effort, 2) the content would (should?) be penalized for plagiarism so they would have very little traffic and 3) developers are probably the worst audience to try and monetize with ads due to the prevalence of ad blockers.
Mine and my partners parents learned c (badly) at some point. Nearly everyone on the b2b customer support team at my last job could sling some js. A surprising number of marketers learn to wrangle some carousels/buttons/etc. vba script excel monster stories are prevalent.
These people are great to monetize. They are paid well and doing something they don't understand well.
I see them in search results often enough (sometimes even before the SO post they've scraped) that it seems to be working, and the search engines (both DDG and Google for me) haven't caught on.
my least favorites are the generic "difference between" sites, none of whose domains I can remember at the moment. but they really drive me nuts when I want to find results from people who actually know what they're talking about.
Yes, the ones that say the difference between React and Angular is React has 4,000 GitHub stars. There is a world where “there’s no relevant article” is a better answer than... these results.
Pinterest is somehow getting its tentacles beyond image search now, too. I was recently researching interior paint colours and if I do a search like "interior colours dark walls" (NOT image search) then of the first 10 results there are 3(!!) Pinterest results from three different domains - .com, .co.nz and .co.uk (I'm sure your results will differ based on your region).
It's incredible to me that Google isn't doing SOMETHING to prevent Pinterest from duking their results, and actually seems to be losing ground to Pinterest's SEO dark patterns.
Of the remaining 6 results on that page, 3 of them were low-quality articles with generic language about paint schemes and lots of images, ALL of which had those little Pinterest share badges on them. I don't know it for a fact, but I strongly suspect that these ubiquitous types of websites are either produced in Pinterest's own content mills or are paid for by Pinterest marketing teams.
I really dont get how they've gotten away with it this long. Google killed off eHow relatively quickly after we started doing our shady SEO practices but yet...
I have a feeling it's not SEO, but that Google themselves are favoring more domains over another based on a hidden factor. If you search for recipes you get the same thing, a bunch of results from big media organizations but very few (or none at all) results from smaller forums, self-run sites etc.
If I were to put my cynical tinfoil hat on, I would say Google has optimized a lot of search results to be favored towards sites which heavily advertise/track their users. Google results are no longer "search term" being matched to "content" but there are additional layers which do more magic, like "is this publisher considered favorable or trustworthy to Google" and "will this result generate a positive ROI for Google".
You can read about what the criteria is, but in short, it directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites.
I... did not know this. It's good to know that Google is also responsible for killing the non-corporate web alongside Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps more insidiously.
This is (i think) also happening with youtube. There were a bunch of funny political videos a couple of years ago (eg. "Trump insult compilaton" etc., from different independent individuals), and searching for those terms now just shows videos from CNN, BBC, ABC, CNBC, and other corporate media houses.
That's a very cynical take away from a document saying expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are the most important measures of page quality.
I can see how forums would take a hit because users are anonymous, but personal blogs and niche websites should be rated high. Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines. This would seem to go more so for niche websites as demonstrated expertise should be more apparent.
Note that site reputation was listed as the very least important metric.
I doubt anyone else read all 168 pages, but can you direct me to the page that supports your claim? I didn't find anything that I would qualify as "directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites."
> Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines.
Obviously I haven't read this whole thing during my lunch break but if what you say is true then it explains a lot about why search quality has suffered the last ten years.
Forums, personal blogs and niche websites are often exactly what I want.
Because to optimize the analytics, you optimize the site for analytics and inherently give Google more detailed data. There’s no way Google isn’t using that data.
It's sad, because Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers. I was glad when Quora started to outcompete Yahoo Answers, but now Quora is full of long opinionated diatribes. It's been totally useless to me for the last 3 years.
The idea behind pinterest is that unsuspecting users grant it legal immunity and full worldwide free distribution rights on everything that they "upload".
So basically, it's a convenience plugin for copyright infringement. Add some ads to other people's content and you're making money.
When I worked for google as SRE for the web crawler, I low key advocated for de-indexing pinterest, but didn't get anywhere, (this is unsurprising, I was a nobody there.) I have no insight into why they don't de-index pinterest, but I know pinterest was on the radar as a thing of some sort. Meantime, I just add "-site:pinterest.*" to image queries... which I gather is probably more or less the sort of thing this addon does.
You don't have to answer this if you don't feel like it, but I always wondered if "-site:food.bar" is a search signal against that web site when Google ranks domains.
Goddamn Pinterest. No I don't want to sign up for Pinterest just to look at this pic that Google Image Search thinks is available to the general internet!
If you right click on the larger image that appears in the dark sidebar popout in Chrome(ium), and select 'View image..' that also works (most of the time).
Indeed. I did a ctrl-f on the comments to see if someone had mentioned Pinterest already. Basically everyone I know who uses the internet consciously (as opposed to say people like my parents who "click the e on the desktop") would install this if this only came with this one website it blocks, period. And as others wrote not only in an image search, but for all searches. As soon as you search for something that can be vaguely expressed visually (home renovation, clothing, layout, ...) pinterest will somehow force its way into the results.
When you search for a file extension, almost always those useless sites pop up that are just advertisements for a ``driver manager" or ``registry cleaner". The justsolve wiki[1] is a pretty good resource for file extensions, but it's not popular enough yet to rank high in search results.
After looking into it a bit it seems like a good resource, but a few tweaks would be handy:
- TLS would improve the site ranking and make it look much more serious. These days plain HTTP is just a red flag.
- "This Site's URL is permanently http://fileformats.archiveteam.org!" is the first thing I see. That's just weird. Who actually cares? And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user? This is just confusing and makes the site look like it hasn't changed since the 90s.
- "First Time Visiting This Wiki? Please read the Statement of Project to understand why this project exists. Then check out the FAQ for some frequently asked questions about the project and its goals and procedures. Finally, brush up on the guidelines for Editing." Err, no, that's not what any first time user would do, that's what power users might do.
I imagine that right now, it's mostly an internal site for people involved in Archive Team to build out content, and there's an intent to actually publish this as something end users might find useful later.
And pinterest, expertsexchange and a bunch of others. Right now I blackhole them in the DNS, being able to strip them out of serps is a great idea, it puts the lie to Google serving you what you want though.
w3schools.com used to be crap but recently it just gives you what you need to know right away with a couple of examples without delving into the epistemology of what each object, unlike mdn, w3c and the like. It's the next best thing after stackoverflow when it comes to getting the most likely answers quickly.
The lack of information in w3s can cause confusion. I had a recent example when looking for an interaction in CSS that seemed completely bonkers to me that was immediately explained in the first paragraph of MDN. I decided to look up how it was documented on w3s (disclaimer: I hate it) and they never even mention it.
Sorry for it not being a concrete example, it was last week and I don't have access to my machine atm.
W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.
> W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.
Even in that case W3schools is mostly good for getting in the way of the much more useful MDN link that should be the top result.
I agree in theory, they improved and surely the result of improvement should be a stopping of the punishment, but I still can't make myself click the links.
Anyway when I know exactly the method I want I just add mdn to the search to make it come up. Especially because if it is a specific method I probably want a deep dive, not just some examples.
For me, "delving into epistemology" is critical. A straight-up answer, no explanation given, is next to worthless, as I have nothing to evaluate the correctness, completeness, and usefulness of the answer.
In my experience, Mayo Clinic and several other similar sites are ranked far too highly by Google for the paltry information they offer. I can somewhat understand why Google has chosen to deliberately suppress more information-rich sources like Wikipedia specifically for medical queries, but I find it to be extremely annoying. When I search for information about a disease online, I'm usually not trying to use Google as a substitute for asking my doctor, and I don't appreciate Google trying to funnel me to sites that are dumbed down. My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.
> My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.
OK, I see the problem, and I'm not sure how Google can solve it. The problem is that you are unlike the vast majority of other Google users. Most of the time someone is searching for an illness, it's because they think they (or someone they know) has it. Mayo Clinic is great for that.
I personally sometimes search for more detail, but then I usually go directly to Wikipedia (which has as much info as a layperson like me can understand, but much more than Mayo Clinic).
I also used cplusplus.com a lot when learning, and (as far as I can tell) it's basically fine, but cppreference.com has been my go-to for quite a while now. The latter is subjectively more complete/precise/helpful to me (and it's just as a good a reference for C, which is actually what I mostly use it for).
cplusplus.com just has worse information; it annoys me because it outranks cppreference.com and I have never been the the former and said "gee, I'm glad I came here because it had better details".
But I trust cppreference more for the details, which are often necessary for C++ because, well, the devil's in the details. (And to be totally honest, the styling is just nicer.)
Compare the docs for std::vector for example, cplusplus[0] and cppreference[1]. The former spends three paragraphs explaining the internals, whereas the latter only spends one. The latter also includes information about what's been introduced on which language version (11, 17, 20) and assorted facts that the former doesn't discuss, e.g. the various container contracts that vector fulfills.
I can't wait until I get home and try this. I am completely sick to death of Google image search results being full of videos. It's impossible to find an actual gif to imbed in an HTML comment post because the results are drowning in videos from Giphy, Tenor, etc. It'll be so delicious to consign them to oblivion.
Edit: unfortunately it doesn't work on image search. Oh well.
When I log out, YouTube becomes total trash, so I thought the algorithm was really customized to me. Then I visited a friend to watch some movies and saw half our recommendations were identical. Like we got placed in the same "bucket" or something.
Wonderful idea. I find google to be marginally useful. Mostly though it returns a barrage of low quality results like mentioned here in the comments, that might be related but you really don’t ever want to see. Obvious though it’ll never be allowed on chrome’s web store.
OK, I suppose I could be slightly less lazy and read the source, which shows that you're iterating through the blacklist then iterating through the results page and removing elements that match. There are some default offenders blacklisted automatically by the look of it, nice and simple.
var blacklist = new RegExp('https?:\/\/.*\.(geeksforgeeks|tutorialspoint).*\.*');
function clearURLs(urls) {
var i, j, arr, res, url;
arr = [];
res = document.querySelectorAll('div.rc');
for (i = 0; i < res.length; i++) {
for (j = 0; j < urls.blacklistURLs.length; j++) {
if (res[i].firstChild.firstChild.getAttribute('href').indexOf(urls.blacklistURLs[j]) !== -1) {
arr.push(i);
}
}
}
arr = [...new Set(arr)];
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
url = res[arr[i]].firstChild.firstChild.getAttribute('href');
url = 'Wiper blacklisted URL: <a href="' + url + '">' + url + '</a>';
res[arr[i]].parentElement.innerHTML = url;
}
}
browser.storage.local.get('blacklistURLs').then(clearURLs);
And I just recently looked for something like this because I'm sick and tired of Google top-ranking results from Reddit, where someone asked an intelligent question, and there were zero responses. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an actually-useful response to a technical question on Reddit, but a link to a targeted subreddit always seems to be at the top of my search results now. I wonder how much this is costing Reddit. I hope it's a lot, and they stop this nonsense soon.
I too have noticed the big 3 search engines serving more *eddit links than usual. And without retyping the url, (old.) the comments are hidden anyway so they are effectively a shade worse than useless.
This should already have been part of Google itself. Some sites come up high far too frequently for certain searches of mine, and it's never the best info.
I like that this doesn't completely blow away the result, but I do kind of wish is was further de-emphasized. Maybe smaller font or faded text.
I'm pretty sure it use to be, I remember searching for something like this years ago and stumbling upon a comment saying it had recently stopped that offering.
It basically lets you create a list of blacklisted URLs and then any Google search results that matches against these URLs is stripped to the bare URL alone. The screenshot on the Firefox Addons page is of a much better quality.
"-domain.tld" has the side-effect that it'd not get any results from those domains then; which might not be a good idea (at least in 1% of those cases when say "-domain.tld" might be what exactly you're looking for".
Please make one for Bing. I gave up on Google search about half a year ago initially for all searches that could yield politically incorrect results, but then for all technical searches as well due to these spammy sites. Bing technical search is definitely higher quality and the general results are more politically neutral, but it still needs your extension. I currently find Firefox/Bing to be the most effective combination.
I never personally used Bing much (but memes have told me the same about its search quality). I will take into consideration for the next execution.
I have been also mildly pissed at Youtube results and given how permeated it is into a 'learner's' life, I have been thinking about Youtube too. But in that case I'll have to take more usability into account to allow for right-click>add_to_blacklist kind of thing since there are so many low-quality ad-loaded channels.
I'll second this experience. Bing news has become markedly more curated recently, imo. But it's still miles ahead of Google with respect to treating you like an adult capable of critically engaging with information.
Great work! I actually made something similar 15 years ago with a P2P social networking angle: You could hide/promote results based on your friends' reccomendations.
This is very inspirational! Actually I have something similar in mind- 1. to allow subscribing to friend's or network's lists. and/or 2. Make it a 'window' to your search experience. So it's privacy focused personal/social logic that offers you Google or any search engine that way you prefer. I think PageRank is not enough (or may be too much) for me...
This is a really cool idea. I wish something like that would exist as a Pinboard Extension. Where it just decorates your search results with information about if your friends have it bookmarked, your tags or even blacklist domains if tagged as blacklist:domain or something on Pinboard by you or your friends. Would be a nice way to make use of that data.
This is a great idea! I don't know why I hadn't thought of it beforehand! I looked through your code and it looks like you replace the HTML of the page. Have you considered appending "-site:<blacklisted url> -site:<blacklisted url>...etc" to the end of the search query instead? This way, the user still gets a full page of relevant search results.
I'm not sure how flexible extensions are, but maybe you could intercept all request attempts to google search, append the blacklisted URLs to the search query, then hide them on the loaded page so that the user doesn't have to see the long list of appended, blacklisted URLs.
Thanks. No that has the potential issue of assuming that results from your blacklist are complete crap. That'd be equivalent of removing the search results based on the blacklist entirely (right?). Based on a comment here on HN as well, I think that's not necessarily a good idea. You don't know what you don't know, so may be a blacklisted website may return a valid result (unlikely but probable, so I'm letting that assumption be there).
And feel free to contribute on Github if you like :)
Ah, so it's actually not entirely removing blacklisted results, it's just condensing those results. Personally, I think I'd be more interested in nabakin's idea of editing the query before it gets sent to Google.
Although - like zargon says in a top-level comment - this clearly should just be built into search engines themselves. The only semi-legitimate reason I can think of that they wouldn't be is that results for a given query would be even less reproducible than they already are from person-to-person. But since Google already "personalizes" results, I don't think that's really a factor for them. They could just have a little button at the bottom that says "3 results from sites you've blacklisted - wanna see them?" or whatever.
Since the results are customized anyway, they should also give us a way to assign more or less weight to a result and learn from that for future search queries.
Google News does this on every link (Hide stories from XXX, More stories like this, Fewer stories like this) so clearly the feature exists.
I am thinking about more customization, especially this that allows the user to 1. suppress (like now) or 2. remove the results entirely. But in my defence, it was a weekend project for a noob like me.
I actually have a keyworded URL in my Firefox bookmarks for that, IIRC there is a limit (a very low one if you really want to get rid of all the spam options) for how many sites you can block this way
Sorry to be a pedant here, but I think a title of "Show HN: A Firefox add-on to strip Google search results _of_ 'blacklisted' URLs" is much more clear.
uBlacklist can also filter results on Duck Duck Go and Startpage (it's in settings if you go to chrome://extensions/ find uBlacklist, click on it, scroll to the bottom and click "Extension options"), but I've never tried it.
AS I said in a post above, I've been using TamperMonkey[1] and a userscript[2] to do this. Reading the [virtually non-existent] description of the uBlacklist plugin, it seems to offer the same thing. Now I'm wondering if there's any reason to prefer an extension over a userscript [or vice versa]?
ASIDE: whatever the merits of this particular extension, I think the choice of name is a pretty snidey attempt by the developer to cash in on the popularity of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
1. My hatred for Chrome (kind of recent HN influence) led me into Firefox first and foremost hence Firefox. Even though I'll be porting it to Chrom(ium-e) soon.
2. It could be my attitude but I thought writing ground up vanilla would be much easier than learning a new tool, i.e., I know Greasemonkey only as much as in its name and nothing else about its workflow.
2.1 I guess an addon is easier to distribute/install (?).
Ordering is something that I'm not sure about (but I've myself been thinking about it for a future addon- if not the current one) that would 'weigh' the URLs like .edu/wikipedia etc. much higher. Would such a feature be helpful to you? And as a part of the same addon?
As for only results from specific websites, you may use Google Operators (like inurl, site, etc.)
Good bye corporate news from my search results! I am so fed up with a bunch of news articles always crowding out the top results for nearly every search query. No more having to wade though propaganda soup to find the things i want.
This extension comes at a good time. Just a couple of weeks ago I was wondering how search would feel if you'd remove all news sites (mainstream and otherwise).
inurl filters so that the result URLs must contain the keyword specified. So inurl:w3 would only show results where w3 is in the URL. It works for this use case but it's better to just use site like you mentioned.
You can't even fully rely on those operatorsike site: anymore because Google now happily serves you results from miscreants that tag their scam site urls with valid site names, so instead of getting results from only let's say mozilla.org, you also now get them from their scamsite because they appended the actual mozilla site url into their own.
319 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadThe plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
Otherwise some search results might still be plagued with offenders, though admittingly their presence is much more sufferable.
Are you using this?
https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/
[1] https://github.com/honestbleeps/Reddit-Enhancement-Suite
I miss the niche subs with quality discussion and content, but the rest of Reddit just started overflowing there too and ruined it.
I do not regret deleting my account. Although whenever a web search returns a Reddit link, I don't have RES and old.* redirect to make the site usable any more. Don't know how anyone uses new Reddit.
You can have URL patterns for example: en.cppreference.com/<asterisk>
Edit: I wasn't able to get the star to work in the post
I look to the bottom of the page every time to avoid this terror...
Mine and my partners parents learned c (badly) at some point. Nearly everyone on the b2b customer support team at my last job could sling some js. A surprising number of marketers learn to wrangle some carousels/buttons/etc. vba script excel monster stories are prevalent.
These people are great to monetize. They are paid well and doing something they don't understand well.
Sure they have. They just don't care as long as they made their quick buck off of it.
For image search, fucking pinterest!
It's incredible to me that Google isn't doing SOMETHING to prevent Pinterest from duking their results, and actually seems to be losing ground to Pinterest's SEO dark patterns.
Of the remaining 6 results on that page, 3 of them were low-quality articles with generic language about paint schemes and lots of images, ALL of which had those little Pinterest share badges on them. I don't know it for a fact, but I strongly suspect that these ubiquitous types of websites are either produced in Pinterest's own content mills or are paid for by Pinterest marketing teams.
If I were to put my cynical tinfoil hat on, I would say Google has optimized a lot of search results to be favored towards sites which heavily advertise/track their users. Google results are no longer "search term" being matched to "content" but there are additional layers which do more magic, like "is this publisher considered favorable or trustworthy to Google" and "will this result generate a positive ROI for Google".
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
You can read about what the criteria is, but in short, it directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites.
I can see how forums would take a hit because users are anonymous, but personal blogs and niche websites should be rated high. Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines. This would seem to go more so for niche websites as demonstrated expertise should be more apparent.
Note that site reputation was listed as the very least important metric.
I doubt anyone else read all 168 pages, but can you direct me to the page that supports your claim? I didn't find anything that I would qualify as "directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites."
That is pretty exclusive, IMO.
Forums, personal blogs and niche websites are often exactly what I want.
Can you point to anything that might convince skeptical non-Googlers that Google does not do this?
I think that's what they call "damning with faint praise"
The idea behind pinterest is that unsuspecting users grant it legal immunity and full worldwide free distribution rights on everything that they "upload".
So basically, it's a convenience plugin for copyright infringement. Add some ads to other people's content and you're making money.
WTF Google how do you still allow this crap?
https://gizmodo.com/a-gasmask-becomes-the-most-terrifying-sh...
Googling “gas mask shower head” gave me a Pinterest dump for pages
[1]: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/
- TLS would improve the site ranking and make it look much more serious. These days plain HTTP is just a red flag.
- "This Site's URL is permanently http://fileformats.archiveteam.org!" is the first thing I see. That's just weird. Who actually cares? And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user? This is just confusing and makes the site look like it hasn't changed since the 90s.
- "First Time Visiting This Wiki? Please read the Statement of Project to understand why this project exists. Then check out the FAQ for some frequently asked questions about the project and its goals and procedures. Finally, brush up on the guidelines for Editing." Err, no, that's not what any first time user would do, that's what power users might do.
I’d expect a site like this to have a big list of extensions on the first page.
In my URL bar right now. It requires a browser that respects one's intelligence.
Sorry for it not being a concrete example, it was last week and I don't have access to my machine atm.
Even in that case W3schools is mostly good for getting in the way of the much more useful MDN link that should be the top result.
Anyway when I know exactly the method I want I just add mdn to the search to make it come up. Especially because if it is a specific method I probably want a deep dive, not just some examples.
webmd.com
mayoclinic.com
thoughtcatalog.com
livestrong.com
tutorialspoint.com
OK, I see the problem, and I'm not sure how Google can solve it. The problem is that you are unlike the vast majority of other Google users. Most of the time someone is searching for an illness, it's because they think they (or someone they know) has it. Mayo Clinic is great for that.
I personally sometimes search for more detail, but then I usually go directly to Wikipedia (which has as much info as a layperson like me can understand, but much more than Mayo Clinic).
I love wikihow, but probably not for the reasons they want to be loved.
I'm curious what saagarjha's experience is, too.
But I trust cppreference more for the details, which are often necessary for C++ because, well, the devil's in the details. (And to be totally honest, the styling is just nicer.)
Compare the docs for std::vector for example, cplusplus[0] and cppreference[1]. The former spends three paragraphs explaining the internals, whereas the latter only spends one. The latter also includes information about what's been introduced on which language version (11, 17, 20) and assorted facts that the former doesn't discuss, e.g. the various container contracts that vector fulfills.
[0] http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/vector/vector/
[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector
Edit: unfortunately it doesn't work on image search. Oh well.
We need this for YouTube as well, though the blacklist would be extremely large.
In fact, I wonder if this could be implemented as a filter list for uBlock Origin?
Then, you can configure your search bar to automatically add those terms to your query.
I use FF more nowadays, though, so I'll have to check yours out.
> The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.
Could you explain a little more about how the stripping of the 'blacklist' works.
I rather suspect this has to do with the search algorithm favors known and big domains in the ever going on war against scam and fake sites.
I like that this doesn't completely blow away the result, but I do kind of wish is was further de-emphasized. Maybe smaller font or faded text.
I tried to watch the animation to understand, but it's too low resolution for me to read.
I have been also mildly pissed at Youtube results and given how permeated it is into a 'learner's' life, I have been thinking about Youtube too. But in that case I'll have to take more usability into account to allow for right-click>add_to_blacklist kind of thing since there are so many low-quality ad-loaded channels.
Check out some old screenshots from Firefox version 1.0: http://getoutfoxed.com/screenshots
It went viral on del.icio.us and let to me taking venture funding to found www.lijit.com, which lives on now as http://sovrn.com/
The Firefox UI won't let me see what the other 195 domains are.
https://github.com/davidahmed/wiper/blob/master/manifest.jso...
EDIT: Even better, they're also listed right on the extension's page:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/
Left side, "Permissions" (click to view all)
I'm not sure how flexible extensions are, but maybe you could intercept all request attempts to google search, append the blacklisted URLs to the search query, then hide them on the loaded page so that the user doesn't have to see the long list of appended, blacklisted URLs.
And feel free to contribute on Github if you like :)
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wiper/
Although - like zargon says in a top-level comment - this clearly should just be built into search engines themselves. The only semi-legitimate reason I can think of that they wouldn't be is that results for a given query would be even less reproducible than they already are from person-to-person. But since Google already "personalizes" results, I don't think that's really a factor for them. They could just have a little button at the bottom that says "3 results from sites you've blacklisted - wanna see them?" or whatever.
Google News does this on every link (Hide stories from XXX, More stories like this, Fewer stories like this) so clearly the feature exists.
I actually have a keyworded URL in my Firefox bookmarks for that, IIRC there is a limit (a very low one if you really want to get rid of all the spam options) for how many sites you can block this way
https://www.google.com/search?q=test+-site%3Aa1.com+-site%3A...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-search-bloc...
It's also one of the best extensions I've seen in terms of code quality: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist
[1] https://www.tampermonkey.net/ [2] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
ASIDE: whatever the merits of this particular extension, I think the choice of name is a pretty snidey attempt by the developer to cash in on the popularity of uBlock Origin and uMatrix.
https://byuu.org/projects/google
Bravo! Thanks so much or developing this.
As for only results from specific websites, you may use Google Operators (like inurl, site, etc.)