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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I don’t think they are trying any more. I received a Google search result the other day that was a word for word copy of a SO answer - it even had “stack overflow” in the page title. The spammers weren’t even trying to hide the fact.

Nevertheless, the result ranked a couple of lines higher than the SO article it was a copy of. I mean, come on.

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The amazing part is that you’ll probably get the same site a month or two from now. I am disappointed that Google doesn’t have a blocklist feature & you’d think they’d want the training data (although I imagine abuse could be a severe challenge).

They could at least let their users blacklist sites from their personal search results.

There are extensions that do this though, thank God.

Which extensions would you recommend for this?

uBlacklist allows manual blacklisting from Google Search. Somewhat useful for me.

uBlock origin in combination with a list like this one:

https://github.com/levymetal/filter-lists

One possible reason that Google doesn't offer a blocklist is that Google only provides a limited number of results per query. Given Google typically shows more than one result from the same domain, so with a blocklist, it would actually have to devote resource to find results from different domains.

Considering the lack of competition I can't blame them for not trying. Why spend the money? Nobody is going to use Bing lol.

You’re right of course, despite the fact that I personally use Bing indirectly via DDG.

That said, my personal anecdata is that, a few years ago, g! Google search results would often find things that DDG didn’t - but today, those results rarely help (hence my OP).

I am not super confident DDG has got better, but it certainly feels like Google’s quality has diminished.

Of course we can blame them for not trying. Why spend the money? Because it's the right thing to do for humanity. But hey Google is not a charity, what matter is stock growth, therefore we're excused of throwing ethics and empathy out of the window as long as in the end shareholders have the comfortable monopoly which allows their investments to generate more wealth with minimum effort.

This is surprisingly wise. Lack of viable competition led google to become decadent. They’re now facing a change in the environment that threatens their business model. Will they change or die? Probably a combination of the two.

That definitely worked for a decade but I have to say it’s rare that I find better results on Google than Duck Duck Go, which is a big change.

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