Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

I miss the days when this was a feature built into Google. It could do all the removal server side.

I love uBlacklist. However, when I started to "block" scam sites I became acutely aware of just how many there are. It is like playing endless whack a mole.

I recently have had the need download some Windows software and all the top links from Google are scam sites. By that I mean they pretend to look like the legitimate / real site and they can be damn good at it.

No wonder my dad for one has downloaded stuff from those kinda sites.

I started blocking them, but there seemed to be an endless supply.

I am hoping users can work together to create smart blacklists, and there are already some subscription feeds for it.

I do worry about performance as the lists grows.

View on HN

> I miss the days when this was a feature built into Google. It could do all the removal server side.

Seriously was this ever possible?

On Twitch we can block a channel or category.

I believe on Twitter you can say "not interested" although it is more obscure what it does.

Google really should have a way of saying "not interested in this website, ever". Plus, wouldn't that be useful data for them?

> Seriously was this ever possible?

I'm pretty sure google used to take some action on terms of the form "-SomethingIDontWant" (for example "nice picture -pinterest") which was common on search engine that pre-dated it. IIRC it never entirely threw out all results with the negative term in them, but it at least used the negative term against results when assessing their weighting.

Maybe it still does, but pinterest have done so well at the content saturation and SEO games that even with the negative weighting they drown out more useful results? Either way it is a usability downgrade for Google's image search.

Domain blocking was some 10+ years ago, while "-site:pinterest.com" still works. I simply use Unpinterested, an extension that adds -site:pinterest to every image search on Google and have been happily ever after.

> Seriously was this ever possible?

Yes. Many years ago the "..." menu on each search result had a "Block this domain" button, and you could manage your blocklist from your profile.

I can't find much information about it online, but this page from 2012[1] mentions it was already disabled:

  Google also offers a web dashboard for manually blocking spam websites, one URL at a time. You can add up to 500 different websites to your blocked list and Google won’t show pages from any of the included sites provided you are signed in with your Google account. That’s the promise but unfortunately, this solution doesn’t seem to work anymore.

[1] https://www.labnol.org/internet/block-websites-from-google-s...

Found the original post where this feature was announced: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-m...

Note that it was not even on the "..." menu (it didn't exist at the time), it was a naked button under every result, reading "Block all example.com results".

Chuck another feature into the pile of "look how far we've regressed".

> However, when I started to "block" scam sites I became acutely aware of just how many there are. It is like playing endless whack a mole.

Someone ought to build a service that indexes websites based on how relevant they are to the user and only return those results, sorted by relevance.

We need a p2p client side / federated search engine, with customisable white/blacklists and proper caching. Able to both work with results of other search engines and index specific websites itself.

winget or chocolatey can help with that. Just keep an eye on the versions served up sometimes they can be a bit old.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com