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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Quora is only one of many garbage domains that clutter google results. Pinterest is another big one.

Google needs a "block this domain from my search results"-- they even had it, for a brief period of a few months a number of years ago. (maybe only for some users?)

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I've been using a userscript called Googles Hit Hider by Domain from Jefferson Scher that allows you to blacklist sites since Google removed the ability to do it natively (it works with all the major search engines, not just Google as the name implies) : http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

[Edit: credit the author of the script]

Thanks for sharing, I found it very useful.

And yelp! Search for "generic food item" and yelp will come up with these auto-generated lists refreshed monthly to catch the attention of the google crawler.

1. top 10 X near you August 2019

2. top 10 X near you July 2019

3. top 10 X near you June 2019

etc.

They're just taking the top 10 reviewed places on yelp that may or may not serve that food item and then publishing these monthly "posts" to be indexed. If I wanted to look on yelp I would search yelp!

I know. It's so frustrating. And it can't be that effective. I mean how many people actually live in an area where "Top 10 Cambodian Restaurants Near You" isn't nonsensical?

Which is what I see anytime I am trying to lookup ideas for some niche restaurant genre.

I decided to try to search for “Sushi” on both Google and DDG. Top results on Google:

  Sushi in Singapore (thehoneycombers.net)
  9 BEST Places To Get Affordable Sushi In Singapore UNDER ... (thefinder.com.sg)
  Sushi (wikipedia.org)
  Best Sushi in Singapore, 2019 (burpple.com)
  The 11 Best Affordable Sushi Bars in Singapore (timeout.com)
  The Best Singapore Sushi (tripadvisor.com.sg)

On DDG:

  Sakae (sakaesushi.com.sg)
  Sushi (wikipedia.org)
  Sushi Tei (sushitei.com)
  Umisushi (umisushi.com.sg)
  Sushi (japan-guide.com)
  Sushi Recipes (sushirecipies.org)
  The Different Kinds of Sushi (delishably.com)

Google displays the spammy list articles you mentioned, while DDG generally lists Sushi chains.

I think I prefer the DDG results, but I guess that depends on the quality of the list links that Google provided. I guess the differences can be explained by Google being much more targeted by SEO tricks.

I entirely agree.

Quora and Pinterest are particularly routine spam sites in my search results.

They rank just below word reference site spam, like dictionaries, thesauruses, or translation dictionaries (sites which I do benefit occasionally from), and below Wikipedia mirrors (which I feel has become so bad that I can't even get legitimate results talking about the problem itself! Try searching something like: search results spam wikipedia mirror "revolvy" "wikiwand").

But for me, the worst (and most obvious!) offenders by far are "pronunciation guide" spam sites. Just a few examples:

  howtopronounce.com
  howtopronounce.co.in
  pronouncekiwi.com
  pronouncenames.com
  pronunciationof.com
  rightpronunciation.com

plus the scourge of 16-second YouTube videos on channels with names like Pronunciation Guide or Emma Saying.

(If you search for something like "Deidesheimer pronunciation" or "pronounce Canynge" on Google, the vast majority of results will be those spam sites, plus maybe an ancient forum thread from 2004 that veered off topic before anyone even tried to give a serious yet uninformed answer.)

These ad-infested spam sites purport to teach you how to pronounce an unfamiliar name or tricky word (an important and underappreciated service that many people use!). But usually they merely contain computer-generated bullshit, as if fed directly into all available text-to-speech algorithms. Even the ostensibly human-generated recordings and sites are often flagrantly wrong, unsourced, and untrustworthy.

There are a few legitimate sites (such as Forvo, Youglish, etc.), but too often they are woefully incomplete (by nature of their being crowdsourced). Forvo even contributes to the spam with "do you know how to pronounce this word?" false positives.

I once blocked all of the spam sites when the domain-blocking feature you mentioned was built into Google Search; then had to do it once again when I needed a browser add-on to replace the removed feature (which naturally only worked on desktop); and recently I was astonished to find that the add-on also stopped working! The spam never ends.

I know, right? How hard would it be for someone to make a wiki-style site with UGC, a reputation system (I speak this language natively and vouch / do not vouch for this content), a tracker for trending words, fun articles for Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and the like? The Web I used to know seems to be gone or at least in steep decline, supplanted by garbage like this.

There are also the White pages duplicates. Search for a phone number or some digits that resemble a phone number and the first 5 pages of results are all autogenerated reverse lookups under various domains catering to the different plausible personas.

Try searching for “1549 USD in EUR”, and you'll find links to sites that auto-generates individual pages for every amount.

One might argue that the SEO garbage here is less bad, since there really isn't any alternative site they're stealing hits from, but it's still a sign that shows just how horrible the web has become.

Yelp is another I’d rather not see since it is crippled on mobile.

I'd love to have this feature. Does anyone know if this is somehow possible with ddg?

I suspect google is already filtering your search results based on your behavior. I have no proof of this - only suspicion. I purposefully don't click on quora or pinterest. Lately I see them much less on my results feed.

Uhm, you can do this simply by appending to your search query:

`-site:quora.com`

That's a hassle to type every time, not to mention the typing itself being a little high on the difficulty scale, what with two shift characters and a left-pinky letter.

The request is for a way to have that automatically added. It gets rather tiring adding -site:pinterest.com to every image search I do.

In some browsers which store search urls as string with a %s qualifier it should be easy I guess.

browser key shortcut that searches google and adds -site:pinterest.com -site:quora.com

done! (mostly)

IDK but do a search with https://www.gmbmg.com/ and check the URL it uses. It may be a useful trick.

I would gladly pay a monthly payment to have this type of feature on my Google searches and more stuff.

I can't imagine google adding it, but it would be something which would finally make me move to duckduckgo.

I use DDG and rarely see pinterest or quora results.

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