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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

A few times I've landed on Pinterest and they lock user copied (contrary to copyright law in my country AFAICT) content behind a registration-wall. They never show enough utility for new to register, they just tease on Google and then don't show what they teased.

Google results would be better for me with all Pinterest results removed.

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Wasn’t there an option at one time to tell Google to hide results from a certain domain? I feel like I haven’t seen that in years though

Just add `-site:example.org` to your query.

I have done this throughout COVID for the NYTimes' content, as it's behind a paywall.

Interestingly, if you use Brave, it lets you hop to the tor versions of sites, and since NYTimes has a tor version, if you visit that, it’s paywall free.

I use Brave. How do I hop to the Tor version of a site?

If you go to a site that advertises (via HTTP header) that it has a Tor version, you'll get an "Open in Tor" button at the end of the address bar.

Examples are nytimes.com and dw.com

It still works

-site:pinterest.*

Even with wildcard tld, otherwise it is still all Pinterest

But it is interesting that those kind of Google/search engine feature hardly ever get talked about these days whereas in the past they were considered crucial to get decent results.

I don't know what the pathway for this is but just -pinterest does it for me.

-pinterest removes pages that contain the term pinterest, so pages from a pinterest.* domain, plus articles about pinterest, etc.

Sounds pretty good to me. If I'm searching for a term, but don't want results from pintrest, then I'm probably not wanting to read an article about pintrest either.

"Here's a picture I took today. I also posted it on Instagram and Pintrest."

If you wanted to read an article about Pinterest, it would probably be hard to search for it in any other way.

Except that the word "pinterest", like pinterest.* results, appears in all the nooks and crannies of the rest of the Web. Excluding the domain like that succeeds in narrowing the scope of the search without excluding content unduly.

I use that a lot. Wouldn't Google notice if a lot of people were telling it they don't want to see results from Pinterest and make some adjustments to their SERPs?

That's a nice hack, thanks! I've just modified my Google search engine entry in Chrome to include this.

It was too effective.

You can hide sites with a flag in the query. No idea if it works on image search but I assume it does.

    -site:pinterest.com

I don't get why Google doesn't give an option to permanently remove or downgrade certain domains, straight from the results page. There are results I am never interested in. It could also work as a further signal for their ranking, if used with some caution.

Probably Google would do good to give up total control and obscurity and put people in the driving seat of search customization. Maybe that would even save them from the anti-trust push (one indexing and retrieval back end + multiple ranking, filtering and UI front ends).

But I'm wondering if this would not be better implemented at browser level. Can we have the white/black list run locally in the browser, re-ranking results on web pages and hiding what we don't want to see? Not just on Google, but also on the rest of the web, like ad blocking extensions.

There use to be an easy way to configure your account to always block certain domains, but that's gone now, so you have to use -site per-query. Maybe there are browser plugins that help? I miss the old functionality. I only had to block about a dozen sites to get great search results. Maybe it'd be less viable now; I'd probably have to block hundreds or thousands of sites, and they'd keep breeding new ones.

You used to be able to tweak part of the URL in the Firefox google search thing, and append queries I thought so as well.

Just make a search that excludes all the domains you despise. Don't include any search terms or just a dummy one.

Then save it as a bookmark.

e.g.

  "-site:foo.* -site:bar.* ..."

Use that bookmark as your search engine: click on it, then fill in search terms.

Yep. Google removed it.

https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/issues/674

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