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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> I really wish a search engine would empower me to provide a URL ban list that gets applied server-side instead of filtering on the front end (if anything).

The irony is that Google wants all our information "to improve our user experience", except they don't want our ban lists.

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Goggles is coming. https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf

This is an exciting idea, but the style of the paper is off-putting. It's written in the style of an academic paper, while clearly eschewing associated norms like not giving blatant opinion or waxing philosophical.

"The rationale is not to customize the ranking according to the implicit interests of the user, but to offer a mechanism to define multiple rankings, plural, open and explicit, for only if it is so, can it be trusted."

Please put opinions in a blogpost and uphold the (reasonable) norms of the research community, for only if it is so, can your work be trusted.

pinterest. Bane of all image searches.

It’s a bit ridiculous, really. I actually don’t feel the need to ban that many sites. I would probably be happy if I could just ban them. How can one site be so bad?

I don't actually want Google to index as much of the internet as it possibly can. I actually want streamlined indices that are tailored towards thoroughly searching a specific knowledge domain.

Edit: I would love, love, love a search engine specifically tailored towards programming questions. One that doesn't treat queries like "C# ?." as me looking for "C#" and getting the most generic results possible.

I had an idea for this where I was building a manually-constructed index of sites kind of like old-school Yahoo (related to typography), and then there would be a full-text search of those URLs and their close relatives (pretty much, the idea being that for a given URL, I'd index anything else in the same URL directory or subdirectories of that URL). I ended up giving up on it largely because time is finite and I have plenty of other projects competing for my time. I imagine something that built on the basic idea though could work, by omitting the Yahoo-style directory and instead working from a collection of vetted URL starting points.

Yes, instead of Google collecting information about me to improve my search experience, I want:

- A box where I can select the context of my search.

- The box then appends a specific string to the query.

For example, if I set the box to "clothes", the box will append "waist 34 inch, 5 feet tall" to the query.

If I set the box to "programming", the box will append "favorite_languages:Python,C++" to the query.

And of course a search engine should interpret it accordingly. No need to collect and store my personal information.

I just want a search engine that gives me AND, OR, and NOT qualifiers or something similar. Parens, too, if possible. Ideally, an sql interface, but that's probably pushing it :)

You can have that with my idea. Just leave the Combobox empty.

> Ideally, an sql interface

You could use Google BigQuery to write such queries for the whole internet (or parts you chose)

I’d like a ban lis option with public ban lists that I can elect to use so I can avoid having to spend time doing this manually.

Think of it as server side uBlock for search results.

If you have a (very) short list you can make/modify a search engine entry to add a -site:which.ever for each that cause problems. The problem is that the scummy sites are legion but the negate list / search term limit usually cannot handle many - I don't know what Brave's limits might be.

seriously, any Googlers around that are close enough to search to know why Pinterest is still dominating image results despite being incredibly low quality? this is a widely known problem.

We have had a few posts about this, a blog from an ex-employee explained it basically as Pintrest spending tens of millions to do everthing they can to game Google search results and they arn't going to stop any time soon. Pinterest just puts A LOT of time and money into SEO.

I guess that makes sense... but it seems like they should be manually penalized. They're single-handedly degrading the quality of the entire image search product.

yelp, pinterest, w3schools

Prior to mdn w3schools was a decent way to quickly find info on random HTML tags. Not sure why it gets so much hate.

For me the issue with all of these sites is that their primary innovation seems to be dominating search results, and everything else is an afterthought. I actually don't know very much about w3schools other than that I have to continually reach over them to get what I'm after.

I also seem to remember reading a lot of critiques like this one: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/280484

w3schools has its place but it’s usually the top result when I’m never looking for it.

Once it was useful. But now I memorized all the information there so it’s not interesting.

Prior to the popularity of MDN and campaigns like W3Fools (q.v.), the articles on W3Schools were very bad from a web standards perspective (<marquee> and VBScript levels of bad); from a programming perspective, their PHP articles (which largely date from that time) are still incredibly shoddy. Their unwillingness to relinquish the unwarranted authoritative tone or at least visibly disavow any connection to the W3C (who asked repeatedly), coupled with their domination of search results, at a time of a standards push (remember validator buttons?) and multiple high-quality documentation efforts (later folded into MDN; Opera in particular had a good course) just plain got on people’s nerves.

They’re a valid reference, just a low-grade one, and using a low-grade reference is rarely a good tradeoff. They also used to be worse and never quite shook of their reputation.

All the various gif sites that make it nearly impossible to get an actual gif. Why the fuck are they showing up on image results if the thing they serve to actual humans is a video? I thought tricking the Google Bot was supposed to be bad for SEO, but I guess not.

pinterest the most useless website in the search results

I use the uBlackList addon in Firefox to block Pinterest results from Google search results with the following regular expression:

    /pinterest\..*/

It also appends "block this site" links to all search results.

Also Tenor. They've taken over just about all animated GIF results, then take steps to make it as annoying as possible to simply download the GIF.

Tenor is owned by Google.

I had no idea. That explains a lot

At least move it in the "Image" tab; (facepalm)

I can’t remember if it was a former feature of Google search or a Chrome extension, but that capability used to be available in Chrome. w3schools was on that list, among other republishers and whatnot. Loved it. Maybe someone else can augment my hazy recollection.

Yes! I swear I remember banning some of those spam domains in 2010 or so. IIRC, I thought it was part of Google search.

It definitely was. Sadly it was short-lived, it lasted maybe a year. I remember banning experts-exchange and being a lot happier.

> Sadly it was short-lived

Understandable since a few years later Google would acquire Doubleclick Inc, which back then was number one in polluting the web with advertising, and first entry in all adblockers kill lists.

You're probably thinking of "Personal Blocklist", an official Chrome extension developed by Google. It's no longer available.

https://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/18/blacklist-google-search-re...

Someone should inform https://killedbygoogle.com/ to update their site.

That’s the one! Thank you.

That actually sounds awesome. But the user in control? No wonder Google killed it ...

They sure want to improve their own user experience. The "use your information to make tons of money" experience.

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