Hacker News Reader

Comment by radley | Hacker News Reader

Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches.

http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

View on HN

Not so fast.

CSE wants you to list sites that you want to search from. Of course, you can't default to '' or '.'. They even stated that '.com' and '*.org' etc. won't return any results. That's unacceptable. Secondly, given you could configure it meaningfully it seems it's pretty hard to configure your browser's search bar to use this CSE instead.

And that's what I think most people use for searching. At least I do.

Facebook got it right this time: with each post, there's an option to hide that post, that person, that application, or that site which posted the post. One click that means "don't show stuff from them anymore": that's what Google needs, too.

I made my custom search secondary.

By this I mean I added it to my browsers, but I still use regular Google search daily. If the results is laden with bogus sites, then I switch over and start again, weeding if necessary.

Initially I thought I'd use GCS all the time, but it lacks the Google menu (Images, Maps, etc) which comes in handy more often than I expected. I use GCS most for code/development related searches.

If you leave the included sites empty, and only supply excluded sites, then it searches everything and excludes those particular ones.

It did require me to fill in the included sites :-(

You have to add one to get started, then you can delete it.

Business rule bug...

I can't believe this isn't the most popular comment. Kinda makes HN look a bit like a knowledge vacuum with all these recent discussions of how to ban results when a google service that's existed for nearly 5 years can do the job. The format of the results isn't quite a nice as the normal google search though.

Err, I mentioned this well before the comment above:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2075437

It's not so much that it's a knowledge vacuum, just that someone didn't read the whole thread before replying.

I'm on the "wrong" side of the Flash/HTML5 debate, so my average post value is really low. It wasn't a big deal until the HN algorithm got tweaked recently.

Agree with the sibling poster - this is the best comment in the thread. Do you have any interest in sharing your hard work with us?

If you go to the CSE website and select 'Advanced' and then download annotations, you can export the list of sites you've excluded.

Further you can make the exclusion list ("annotation list") into a feed - so it is entirely possible to implement the kind of user-generated blacklist of sites which has been discussed here.

GCS is rather personalized, which makes sense. For example, I don't want experts-exchange showing up, but some people have paid for their service and want it. I'm also a Flash developer, so my list probably won't be useful for most HN readers.

GCS is really easy to set up - takes only a few minutes. I spent the most time hunting down rouge sites - which was actually kinda fun and cathartic.

Big tip: keep an easy-to-get-to link to the GCS Sites Control panel, so it's easy to add new sites. I've added ~40 more in the past two months.

It's definitely easy to set up. I'm thinking about making a greasemonkey script to put a button next to my search results and let me block the site if I hate it, rather than go do it manually as you suggested (which is easy but takes more time than hitting a button).

Alternatively I will stick to my plan to change search providers. One way or another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com