Show HN: An open source extension to block large media brands from Google search (github.com)
Google sends 16 large media brands (588 individual brands) a combined 3 billion+ clicks per month. They rank first page on 85% of all searches.
They are inundating the web with things like subpar product recommendations, AI written listicles, and cookie cutter reviews.
I don't like that, so I made an open source extension that blocks all of them from search results. (I'm not a developer, and I made this with Claude Opus's help)
31 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 61.9 ms ] threadWhy are we blocking amazon.co.uk and amazon.in? Why not block amazon.com by whatever that logic is? hulu.com gets a block, but why not netflix.com? Or why hulu.com in the first place? If there is a reason, it would be valuable to express that so people aren't just blindly blocking sites simply for being popular.
You mentioned the article about 16 media companies. What would have been really useful if you made a table/list of each media company and it's domains.
When I read the Housefresh article, I googled all dotdash meredith sites and blocked them using UBlacklist. Didn't have enough energy to find the other 15 company sites.
In any case, the title is "large media brands" so urls like "nytimes.com" and "washingtonpost.com" are consistent with that theme but the "blocked_domains.txt" also has "apple.com" and "microsoft.com" which are not media publications. If the motivation was avoiding SEO spam when searching for reviews of "air purifiers", domains from non-media-publishers like Apple.com and Microsoft.com are not part of that problem.
If instead the author is really trying to block "any big companies" rather than just "big media", it seems other giant non-media companies like NVIDIA, Toyota, JPMorgan, etc would also be on there.
Can't you simply go through this image and manually create a list from all the logos?
Yes, it would take time and would be tedious, but it's very possible to do in an afternoon.
This shows that your primary mistake is not that you’re not a developer, but that you are not willing to devote time and be analytical about the problem you want to solve.
It’s a cool idea and personally I would still do the research, revise the list, and then post it to HN once more. It’ll get a much better reception.
That doesn't make the content wrong or bad, but it means that the diverging incentives between producers and consumers is going to continue a drift towards easy, mediocre, engaging material and true deep-dive information, even with tech articles. The net went from "search, find the source, deep-dive, make tentative judgments" (like one would do at a library doing research) to "search, pop-in, see the listicle five-minute fact-bomb explainer vid, then assume you know everything important there is to know." (as one might do, say, browsing items as a yard sale).
If you're looking for true knowledge, you're going to have to deal with this more and more. It's a tend that's continuing, not some current state of affairs. If you're looking to be entertained and waste time playing games and absorbing random trivia and political justifications for things you already believe, you're in luck: a lot of people and a lot of money are hard at work to keep you happy.
I used to read programming books not for a laundry list of features, but to get inside the author's head and start thinking about programming the way they did. It's not as simple as a simple declarative statement. Many times the author themselves couldn't express the value I got. I don't see how you reduce that any and I'm not sure I'd want to consume it if you could.
Even for the big media sites, they mostly link to other pages on their own website.
PSA: just clicked into this post after reading another submission complaining about how companies don't take security seriously enough.
If you care about the security of your browser, installing a dozen random chrome extensions like this definitely isn't going to help. Especially when the author is a self-proclaimed "not a developer" and made this by copy and pasting code from a LLM.
This new wave of non-developers deploying code to production that makes its way to a Show HN on the homepage here for 7 hours is scary to me. I'm all about making coding more accessible to non-engineers, but security, edge cases, failure states, etc is something LLMs are not particularly good at.
And even the non-code part of the original release of the extension had very little thought put into the block list. (E.g. he was blocking sites like the library of Congress, loc.gov, cancer.gov, CDC.gov, etc). Pastebin list of the originally blocked sites, which the author has since went back and cleaned up: https://pastebin.com/VHuHTeqp
I understand the feeling, and yet different tools/stages of increased digitalization of life are at the root of what is scary, not AI. personal data is input into the "global world computer" at astonishing rate, payments, payment credentials, all this attracting opportunist players with outright intentions of grabbing all this "public" data. even seasoned engineers are vulnerable to supply chain attacks. whether "new" code is developed by or with AI assistants seems the least of the problems in this context.
This isn't dev. This isn't hacking in the classic sense of the word. This is asking a genie to do it, trusting he's not malign or incompetent, and then saying "look, I made this!"
* https://github.com/levymetal/filter-lists
(I don't remember where I took that one from, but probably was from this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33747333)
uBO already works fine on Chrome, Firefox desktop, and Firefox Android. Same syntax could be used to block any other domains, as desired. No need for a whole independent extension to just do that.
https://brave.com/
https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube