I am currently self-hosting my own meta search engine instance (searxng), which allows me combine searches from different engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), but also to filter out websites that I don’t want to show up.
The only website to make my blacklist so far is slant.co (useless SEO-riddled site that always comes up when I search for software comparisons). I also automatically redirect all reddit.com links to old.reddit.com.
I’m looking to expand this list. So, which websites do you blacklist? Either using software, or just mentally.
Pinterest. Fuck pinterest.
I’d add Quora to that list of fuck you websites
The worst, hey we noticed you got a really hard to solve problem, well we got the answer right here, but we’re gonna dim it till you make an account, oh sorry that’s not really the answer thanks for the account sucker!
I made the mistake of making an account one time. Unsubscribing from all the shit they email is an unbelievably annoying task.
It’s the worst. There’s even a browser extension to blacklist them: unpinterested.
I had to get that because I got so tired of having to put minus pinterest in all my image searches.
I don’t explicitly block any, but I usually avoid clicking on pinterest and quora links. From experience, I never get what I’m looking for even without the annoying user interface.
What do people not like about Pinterest? I’ve actually found them very useful for finding pictures of my niche subjects
You cannot just open the image. You must log in to even see most images. Even working around this its scaled to tiny resolution. All content stolen/copied with zero credit/source but their seo outcompetes the original sources.
Pinterest.
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It’s tough because I almost feel like I need a whitelist at this point. 90% of the first page of Google results usually read like AI-generated fluff that doesn’t actually even answer my question. There are a handful of websites I trust now to give me real information and not just clickbait SEO nonsense.
I’m at the point where I add “reddit” to the end of every search just to try and find something that was written by a real person. Maybe someday I can start adding “lemmy” instead.
Seriously, 10 years ago, the best way to find any info on a video game was to go on gamefaqs, ign guides, the steam community or a dedicated wiki.
Nowadays, it objectively still is the exact same, but google will give results for NONE OF THEM unless if you specify. There’s a truckload of those SEO garbage.
codegrepper.com and all its shitty clones.
All they do is scrape websites like stack overflow and github issues and present them in a more shitty way, and they somehow manage to get ranked pretty high.
https://www.grepper.com/images/reviews/review2.png “Review” on their own page. So obviously fake (alignment is off and it doesn’t follow fonts?) Plus, they misspelled their own name. This has got to be a joke
Edit: It may not be fake but i hate this website so i’d like to imagine it is
I don’t blacklist on the ip level but I do use a userscript to blacklist domains from showing up in my search results
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites
These are the domains currently blocked
9to5google.com about.fb.com about.instagram.com business.instagram.com cnet.com developer.android.com developers.google.com ebay.com facebook.com facebookbrand.com fileproinfo.com gadgets.ndtv.com guidebooks.google.com help.instagram.com lifehacker.com microsoft.com orangefreesounds.com research.fb.com rover.ebay.com support.google.com support.ring.com twitter.com www.addictivetips.com www.androidauthority.com www.androidheadlines.com www.collectorsweekly.com www.digitaltrends.com www.howtogeek.com www.instagram.com www.lifewire.com www.quora.com www.storyblocks.com www.theverge.comOoh - a couple of sites missing from my searxng yaml file. Cheers!
Pinterest. Hands down the best quality of life site block.
Before I found an extension to silence them, that putrid site would infest all of my image searches with its gatekeeping bullshit.
I’ve never considered black listing a site before tbh. Do you guys find it worth the effort when you could just, not click on the links?
Not op, but I have been doing this for years with a userscript. Getting rid of SEO garbage, pintrest, quora, etc links makes more room for the helpful results.
It is also a good way to ensure you don’t land on any recipe sites that are built more for wasting your time than helping you cook.
I just got into the habit of permabanning any site that had anti-user patterns, annoying popups, right click/back button blocking, or clickbait headlines. I don’t see a lot of that stuff anymore. Makes the net a bit more useful. Or at least less frustrating.
I’ve been using a Firefox extension instead that has fairly good filters by default, because I kept getting crap results when looking at technical questions (ie. landing on over-simplified examples without details instead of official documentation).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
They publish some subscription lists of things blocked that you can chose from: splogs of GitHub/Stack overflow, Pinterest… And then you can add custom blocks directly from your results list (Quora…). It can be a nice point to start with to use their filter even out of the extension imo.
The kagi search engine allows you block sites, they have a leader board of what the tops ones are here: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard pintrest is getting a fucking.
Aww, alternativeto.net isn’t that bad…
It is in my book. It’s awful
It frequently compares things like apples vs oranges. And the comparison is just wrong. A real example is comparing a photo editing app vs a photo album app. Or something ridiculous like MySQL vs CSS.
Kagi users HATE pinterest.
Perfectly reasonable.
Pinterest. It is the sole reason I use the Google Hit Hider script.
Fandom.
You don’t want to use a wiki that makes your battery start to visibly drain away?
Reddit. I blocked the domain when the blackout started and haven’t been back.
I want to so bad but i end up finding answers there so often and using it for human responses i can’t. Damn You reddit.
*://picclick.com/*
Just reposts old ebay listings as far as I can tell. I guess it could come in handy if you want some historical price data or something, but it mostly just craps up the search results.
All the socials, including Reddit.
I’d be happy if there is a way to block webshops. You can block e.g. Amazon but then there will be another shop in its place.
I wasn’t so happy with Searx but I think I’ll have a look at SearXNG if blocking is an option
In SearXNG you can redirect, or block domains (but you still need to define them). You need to enable the “Hostname replace” pluging in the setting.yaml
enabled_plugins: - 'Hostname replace' # see hostname_replace configuration belowAnd then define the rules like this:
hostname_replace: # My redirects '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': 'old.reddit.com' # My filters 'slant\.co': false 'dailymail\.co\.uk': false
