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Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

I still maintain an independent Futurama wiki from Fandom. Back when they were called Wikia, they wanted to merge with our wiki, but I insisted on a no ads policy. So talks basically went nowhere. They still have a Futurama wiki, and ours is still online. Though, these days, it's mostly other editors filling in the content, I am just a system administrator at this point.

I am still happy with our decision, because Wikia/Fandom has since then just gotten worse.

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They really have gotten worse and it's incresibly frustrating that DDG seems to ignore the Infosphere (and WikiSimpsons) entirely in favor of the fandom sites.

I agree, but I also don't want to waste too much of my life chasing SEO. Fortunately, some people find our site.

A few games I play have DDG bangs that take you directly to the fandom sites, even though the games now have their own self hosted wiki. Perfect exactly would be _minecraft_. If you search for "!minecraft dirt" it takes you to the fandom page. Will DDG update the bang to search via the official wiki? probably not! Maybe now is the time to switch to Kagi

I've submiited a request to DDG, hopefully they update it

Hopefully, given minecraft is a large game. I've submitted requests over the years for other games with no change or response even.

Reminder, you can exclude any site from search results on at least Google and DDG, e.g. '-site:fandom.com' will exclude *.fandom.com from results.

There's also a 'ublacklist' extension which lets you block sites from search results as well. I think this edits the results to erase matched sites, though - you're not communicating to Google, et al. that you don't want to see that site.

ublacklist only works on google, and the OP was using DDG though.

It supports Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, Searx, Startpage.com, Yahoo! JAPAN and Yandex.

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

Kagi makes it easy to essentially delist entire domains. So nice for when you find a content farm or for sites like pinterest. They even provide a list of the most blocked domains: https://kagi.com/stats (Click "Domain Insights")

It's probably safer to lower this one's ranking, rather than absolutely block it. There's more than a handful of things for which fandom.com is the correct result—the only actively-maintained wiki.

Trust the search engine to do the signal/noise calculations for you. You are no longer on Google. Kagi is your agent, not your adversary.

And while Fandom/Fextralife are both irritating sites, they often are the only way to get a certain bit of knowledge on a topic. They've kind of moved into the niche previously occupied by things like Geocities fansites. They're nasty, ad-riddled experiences, but they DO have the information.

Only sites I block on my Kagi are sites that outright trick or lie to the user; keyword content farms, pinterest, and StackOverflow cloners

I have fextralife in my lower list. As you say, sometimes it's the only place. But when there are any other places, I want those in front.

There's an add-on called BreezeWiki which redirects you to an annoyance-free mirror of Fandom sites, which makes it at least a little less annoying to visit those wikis. It can also redirect you to a community-run wiki if it exists.

I found it through Libredirect which is the same idea but for more sites, but some of the alternative sites don't work as well in my experience.

Do you maintain the Infosphere? Because I love that site. Such a gem.

Yes. I was not the original creator. However, when they felt it was too much of a hassle to maintain the site, I asked to take over. The original creator of the site still owns the domain.

Ublock filter can remove fandom results:

  google.*###rso .MjjYud a[href*="fandom.com"]:upward(.MjjYud)

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