uBlacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results
github.com
github.com
For example, here are my filters that block and remove terrible copycats/translations of StackOverflow https://gist.github.com/quenhus/6bd2c47e5780f726f0c96c0a2ee7... . I hate these copies that somehow manage to be better referenced than StackOverflow.
I love uBlacklist, but I felt the community aspect of it was missing, and vital to its success. I felt bootstrapping lists and GitHub repos was the most instantaneous way to enable a community.
I comment each time it hits HN, but beyond that haven’t seen much uptake / contribution towards building blacklists.
I already trust gorhill, and a bunch of Firefox maintainers, with my life and my passwords.
As for trust, that's a more general issue. Personally, I can't imagine someone would go through this much trouble just to ship a trojan and I find the probability of their GitHub and AMO account being compromised quite unlikely since there are far more lucrative targets for such an attacker - including uBlock Origin. I guess there's always the possibility of auditing the code and installing a self-signed version with no automatic updates.
I agree it’s not very risky, but I can absolutely imagine this.
google.*##.g:has(a[href*="pinterest.*"])https://github.com/rjaus/ublacklist-pinterest/blob/main/ubla...
google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest.*"])
google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:upward(1)I tried setting the upward() to 2, but that got rid of all the image results.
You'll know for sure that there is no chance on above average quality or size. Hovering over the image will overlay a "join us" message. If you click to image you get a "join us" modal. When you right click, you get a custom menu, that does have a "Save image" option. But clicking that will just get you the same "join us" again. You'll need to inspector hack the image out, which can quickly become annoying if you need more than one.
Beneath it will be a whole bunch of also promising looking images, but scrolling down a bit will quickly get you, you guessed it, a "join us" modal. Clicking on any image there will get you to another page just like it, but this one often opening with the "join us" modal already open.
If you use Ctrl-click, to save your position in the overview that you inspector hacked the scroll block modal out of, tough luck: that behavior is modified as well. It will just open the new page like a regular click. Go back and you're at the top again.
The site feels like a collection of dark patterns hijacking your image search results.
Imagine if Instagram or Facebook tried the seo garbage pinterest is doing to completely take over image search results... they'd get shut down hard, and there would be screaming matches between c class movers and shakers.
I honestly think there's gotta be a kickback or individual level corruption involved, no other site would be allowed to break Google's image search functionality and reputation. It's not like they can't simply downrank and spread out the results. The pinterest situation is fishy af, and it's been years. Google image search used to be useful. Now it's annoying.
I'm sold.
Death to Pinterest
Is some evil billionaire secretly bankrolling Pinterest as a cruel joke?
Any service that pops up a login and won't let you access any content without logging in I just nope out of and have for many years. Especially user-hostile on mobile (Twitter and Reddit websites work really really hard to force you into using their apps and/or logging in on mobile, much more than on desktop). But maybe we're missing something and Pinterest is super awesome. Maybe I've been using this anti-user UX pattern as a signal for "crapware" but it's not accurate. Maybe fantastic services are hiding behind this pattern.
I'm not gonna sign up to find out but it's interesting to think about.
Or maybe I'll setup a VM for this and finally get FB/Insta/TikTok/Pinterest/Twitter, check em all out, and find out what the rest of humanity has been up to.
So it serves a function for non-tech people. Its format works for them.
I love it.
Pinterest is very popular in my friend group (which contains zero computer nerds outside of myself).
Something hated by billions of nonusers (but not to point of outlawing it) and liked by 25 paying consumers can happily survive as a business.
And Pintereset is actually liked by many people who have user accounts there.
caps intended.
Easier to keep it up to date than a gist.
2. Often, the original website (Github, Stackoverflow) is not present in my search results; in such situations, I prefer seeing the copycats to seeing nothing at all. Wouldn't using these black lists be counterproductive for me then?
google.*##.g:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"])
duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"])
The linked project goes way beyond this though, very neat!Thank you!
Forgot to mention that you can also block arbitrary text with the `:has-text(/regex/)` selector.
Block Medium's cookie notification on any domain:
*##body>div:has(div:has-text(/To make Medium work.*Privacy Policy.*Cookie Policy/i))
Or apply it to search engine results: google.*##.g:has(*:has-text(/word combination to block/i))
duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(*:has-text(/word combination to block/i))That works well enough for me, and it saves having another browser extension to configure!
Not just that, it saves having another browser extension to trust. A large number of the sites I get to are through search results. A malicious extension that has access to modify search results could do a lot of damage.
Hell, I know people who get to their bank and other sensitive sites by typing the name of the institution into Google, rather than typing the URL. Being able to modify search results would be great for phishing.
One less extension equals one less security/privacy liability too!
google.##.g:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])
google.##.g:has(a[href="*.pinterest.com"])
dunno. i primarily use duck which apparently does not show that many pinterest results and even that one didn't work. i would have to investigate
I STRONGLY recommend the latter.
I think what you're trying to write is:
google.*##.g:has(a[href=*"pinterest.com"])
(I'm inferring that based on the italic/roman text in your pattern line. I'm probably inferring wrong.)HN's markup interpreter will style any line indented by two or more spaces as code, and not interpret special symbols. The lines will wrap, however (wrapping is a relatively new feature).
google.##.g:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])
I love uBlacklist. However, when I started to "block" scam sites I became acutely aware of just how many there are. It is like playing endless whack a mole.
I recently have had the need download some Windows software and all the top links from Google are scam sites. By that I mean they pretend to look like the legitimate / real site and they can be damn good at it.
No wonder my dad for one has downloaded stuff from those kinda sites.
I started blocking them, but there seemed to be an endless supply.
I am hoping users can work together to create smart blacklists, and there are already some subscription feeds for it.
I do worry about performance as the lists grows.
Seriously was this ever possible?
On Twitch we can block a channel or category.
I believe on Twitter you can say "not interested" although it is more obscure what it does.
Google really should have a way of saying "not interested in this website, ever". Plus, wouldn't that be useful data for them?
Yes. Many years ago the "..." menu on each search result had a "Block this domain" button, and you could manage your blocklist from your profile.
I can't find much information about it online, but this page from 2012[1] mentions it was already disabled:
Google also offers a web dashboard for manually blocking spam websites, one URL at a time. You can add up to 500 different websites to your blocked list and Google won’t show pages from any of the included sites provided you are signed in with your Google account. That’s the promise but unfortunately, this solution doesn’t seem to work anymore.
[1] https://www.labnol.org/internet/block-websites-from-google-s...Note that it was not even on the "..." menu (it didn't exist at the time), it was a naked button under every result, reading "Block all example.com results".
Chuck another feature into the pile of "look how far we've regressed".
I'm pretty sure google used to take some action on terms of the form "-SomethingIDontWant" (for example "nice picture -pinterest") which was common on search engine that pre-dated it. IIRC it never entirely threw out all results with the negative term in them, but it at least used the negative term against results when assessing their weighting.
Maybe it still does, but pinterest have done so well at the content saturation and SEO games that even with the negative weighting they drown out more useful results? Either way it is a usability downgrade for Google's image search.
Someone ought to build a service that indexes websites based on how relevant they are to the user and only return those results, sorted by relevance.
Maybe the best way to explain how fantastic it is is that I think it has a bang operator like DDG but I have never tested it because when I look at the results they are obviously better than DDG or Google.
their contents was never the best or most relevant back then. but they gamed SEO to position themselves higher than most. they are doing better today? good for them. for some of us who have witnessed the whole thing happen, they will be ignored for a long time.
I can only assume they used to be different?
XSS: https://web.archive.org/web/20060722051641/http://www.w3scho... / https://web.archive.org/web/20060722073110/http://www.w3scho... / https://web.archive.org/web/20060722072840/http://www.w3scho...
Unauthenticated sessions: https://web.archive.org/web/20060716141638/http://www.w3scho...
MySQL injection: https://web.archive.org/web/20110412041949/http://www.w3scho...
Nothing directly wrong with this one but prepared queries were not well understood at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20060718041049/http://www.w3scho...
They were very easy to learn from and thus widely popular, but missed critical security context.
For me personally, w3schools has been one of the most reliable sources of reliable solutions that work not just for the latest Chrome build but across many different browsers and platforms.
Given the cumulative nature of HTML, "outdated" is another word for "reliable and established", IMO.
They're better today, but it's still... let's say an equivalent of empty calories instead of a healthy MDN meal.
More like synthetic junk food, if you ask me.
But looking at a random entry, they list Samsung Internet, Safari, Opera, IE, and others. That doesn't look like ignoring other browsers.
I've pretty much always prefix web related searches with "mdn" these days.
! Hide w3schools from Google search
*://www.w3schools.com/*
google.*##.g:has(a[href*="www.w3schools.com"])1. uBlock - Blocks annoying ads
2. Sponsorblock - Blocks annoying nordvpn, curiositystream, et al
3. uBlacklist - Blocks annoying pinterest, quora, et al
Keep the good fight going guys. Kudos!
Every hit will take you somewhere bad in Pinterest land, and somehow not provide the image you want.
https://www.google.com/search?q=crochet+ducks&tbm=isch
Although I have to admit that the amount of Pinterest results for this search term is acceptable (I see 2 in the top 10).
>much better than mindlessly watching videos on Instagram or TikTok (which I don't do at all).
How can you definitively say that? If I said this thing I never tried is worst than what I do, wouldn't you at least suggest I try it? Good stuff you might really like exists too: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/programmerhumor?lang=en
It most definitely isn't like reddit which, similar to HN, is about topical discussions rather answers by "experts". Frequently I add "reddit" as keyword in my searches but I'ld gladly nuke Quora out of the results.
Comming from the netscape and the likes, having made many circles around many browsers, I am slowly getting to a point where I simply do not trust any of them anymore. Even Firefox makes moves that I dont like, like social logins and other syncing stuff that, for my personal usecase are completly useless and all I want is a html and javascript renderer.
I know, old dogs barking at the train, but I believe that it's us that are to blame for this. Because you know, we build the things....
Sometimes I wonder if our craze for frameworks are to blame for this and the fact that a sponsored framework will -always- have more cash to spare.
Look I have nothing against these features, but if you want to find out what I really do not like, usen an OpenWRT router for a day and have it track outgoing dns packages.
/.pinterest.\../
/.torrent.\../
/.spankbang.\../
/.mp3.\../
/.proxy.\../
/.block.\../
/.addiction.\../
/.recovery.\../
/.detox.\../
/.clinic.\../
/.rehab.\../
/.rarbg.\../
/.hydra.\../
/.123.\../
/.stock.\../
/.linkedin.\../
/.subtitle.\../
/.shopify.\../
/.dreamstime.\../
/.depositphotos.\../
/^(m|mobile|it|es|ja|fr|pl|at|ru)\.\w./
Also recommend TLD filters:
/.\.(tk|photo|dev|page|science|ninja|monster|st|cricket|store|website|help|bg|party|work|xyz|link|camera|computer|click|cc|club|pw|space|info|rocks|review|faith|date|win|racing|site|online|tech|news|life|design|nyc|guru|photography|global|today|solutions|media|world|biz|gq|rest|ga|casa|buzz|cam|ml|fit|ly|it|vip|php|pl|ru|app|name|tr|asia|surf|top|cf|tw|uz|am|krd|is|cz|pt|pk|cl|il|in|hu|hr|si|ee|bid|vn|kw|ro|mx|me|market|nu|how|red|guide|mobi|cafe|tn|xxx|icu|fun|pro|desi|id|live|one|ir|forsale)\/(.*)/
(modify for your personal needs, it'll save you many, many hours in the long term)
I guarantee you that .com, .net, and .org have far more spam and low quality sites than this stupid list.
The problem with extended generic TLDs is that the spam sites have managed to become highly ranked. Yes, there's good stuff there, undoubtedly. But search engines can't find it. At which point it may as well not exist.
I'm not a fan of outright blocking at this level without good cause, but it could well be worthwhile to block an entire TLD in cases.
Blocking them in search lists doesn't stop you finding them indirectly by them being mentioned in content elsewhere, or from even more direct referrals, so the non-junk ones can be found those ways. I tend to find useful content on .com et al as much those ways as by direct search these days anyway.
Always review blocklists rather than applying them automatically as your needs may vary from their creators'. No one list is going to be right for everyone, so criticising one for not being right for you is a bit "me me me me".
Pinterest is not getting one more traffic from me.
As someone who blogs sometimes, Pinterest has been a huge pain-point in finding images and attributing them properly.
It was even sometimes impossible for me to determine the original source of an image and to find out whether or not it could be used in my blog for free.
It was a huge pain for downloading images as well. (I have always downloaded pictures for personal and home use only, never for commercial reason.)
https://www.google.com/business/identity-attributes/ "You can now help your business stand out on Google Maps and Search by displaying the Black-owned attribute, in addition to the Women-Led..."
btw, I don't see a big distinction here if I actually would like to boycott Starbucks so I better boycott Google Maps then.
Wow, that's insane. I've always assumed this stuff is made up by conspiracy nuts (like the "War on Christmas"), but there it is right on their page!
It makes these sites so much less useful. Their unique location catalog is the reason I usually prefer Google, then Bing, over Here Maps or whatever OSM thing. But it's harder and harder to query it to receive anything useful.
A lot of those super annoying ad-filled websites you get directed to from Google Search... Guess who's providing those ads and making money when you accidentally click an ad while trying to get off the website?
not sure what happened to it...
Some years ago I got moms. Nowadays Google seems to serve crap.
CHECK PRICE ON AMAZON CHECK PRICE ON AMAZON CHECK PRICE ON AMAZON
I don’t think anyone was maintaining it. So when the SERP changed its layout, the extension broke and Google removed it :(
For a feature to be interesting to just 1% of Google users, it would need to appeal to 35 million users and this is unlikely. Even if it did, features that touch 1% users rarely get to the top of queue (unless those 1% users are "whales").
I've been using this extension for a good while now, and it's probably saved me a stroke or two.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews+-site%3Anews.ycom...
supporting user controlled blocklists would implicitly acknowledge that their system can miss the mark. i suspect they focus on not missing the mark rather than providing supplies for their users to paper over problems with their system.
i'd be really surprised if there are "certain results they don't want you to filter." separation of editorial and business in publishing has been around for a very long time and it would be pretty hard for them to defend if it came out that they were using their own ad revenue as an input to how they rank and filter results.
edit: i would also suggest that if they were boosting results that drove ad revenue for them, they'd have been caught by now. there are a lot of people out there who make a living experimenting with how to boost a google ranking. if it was as simple as "use google as an advertising partner on your site" i'm sure we'd be hearing about it.
There used to be the same kind of conspiracy theory around G analytics. Hey, guess what?
Google had it for a while, too.
High-ranking search results don't come easily, and there will be a relatively small set of domains occupying any such slots. Even with turnover, that's going to be viable. Remember, the competition here isn't to flood your inbox from any random domain on the Net, but to secure one of the first 10 SERP results. Odds are good that blocking 10--20 domains will be more than enough.
Your list will also likely vary from other people's.
I wish there was a predetermined list with things that are known to be poor results, like pinterest on google image search.
In practice it should be a winning battle, since it takes time and money to spam site up in ranking and low effort to blacklist it.
I will try this out.
Give it a few years and nobody will remember what the big deal was.
Even "Ublacklist" could give the misleading impression that it's somehow related to uBlock or uMatrix.
Reasons:
* I think of the "u" prefix in this narrow technology niche (browser-based filtering) as almost a trademark of the great project now called "uBlock Origin".
* "Blacklist" isn't a term to be making new uses of in the US. (Given ongoing history of racial injustices, and how the terms "blacklist" and "whitelist" have been used in our field to designate "bad" and "good", respectively. Someone can try to argue the etymology, but we're beyond etymology in connotations of the terms now, and it's just insensitive to insist on saying "black" to mean "bad".)
Is your viewpoint that "blacklist" is a racial term in itself, i.e. is used in a racial sense? I've never seen that, and my understanding is that's not the case historically, but call me out if I'm wrong and that's your point.
Based on your comments on disregarding etymology, my understanding is that you're not making the first point. I'm reading your viewpoint more as: "we shouldn't use 'black' as an abstract connotation for 'bad' meanings in words", (presumably due to 'black' being also associated with a group that has a history of racially-motivated prejudice against it, but let me know if this last part is wrong).
I'm also curious if your view is that no colors that have historically described groups should be used as negative descriptors, or is this specific to black people in English? For instance, is your view that phrases like "white bread" to describe boring people, or "brown noser" to describe suck-ups should go away as well?
Additionally, should abstract phrases/words involving the term "black" should be done away with entirely, or that only ones with negative connotations should be avoided? For instance, is it okay for "black ties" to associate "black" with formality, or for "in the black" to be used for businesses that are very successful?
I think I disagree that "blacklist" needs to be associated with black people any more than "white noise" noise needs to be associated with white people. The color black has a long association with a variety of different things, from death ("Black plague") to authority ("Black Rod"), from luxury ("Black Card") to villainy ("Black Hat").
One of the many associations of "black" is with a particular racial group, but that doesn't mean we have to attribute all the associations of that word with that racial group.
It seems to me that if the word itself has no history of racial origin, isn't used today in scenarios of racial prejudice, and the association is not related to a racial group, it seems unnecessary to avoid it.
Like I said, though, I'd definitely love to get a different perspective here.
Because we've had so tragic much of that, in various other ways, and it's time to just say stop that, we mean it, unambiguously.
I might be able to explain the thinking better, were it not 2am, but here goes... Imagine a little kid, of any ethnic/racial heritage, who's picked up on some of the prejudices around "black people" and class. Now try to try to teach them a computing class with the terms "blacklist" and "whitelist", and what they mean. Now you can guess where their thoughts are going, so you try to address that, by saying that you could also say the much more clear "denylist" or "excludelist", and also not have to explain that you don't mean to be offensive or hurtful, but you just really like calling it "blacklist" so much, that overrides all other considerations.
I'm curious about the whole host of other abstract terms which could connote a similar negative meaning if we associated their terms with racial meaning, though. I listed some above, but I'll elaborate here:
* White bread (boring), or white noise (something not worth listening to)
* Brown-noser (a suck-up)
* Yellow journalism (sensationalist news, doubling up on an offensive term for Asian people if we choose to racialize the term)
If the little kid in the example above picked up on racial biases against any of the previous racial groups, and associated that racial group with one of the phrases above, I would expect that they'd be similarly upset.
It seems reasonable, then, to explain to anyone concerned that these are not racialized terms, rather than trying to prevent offense from terms that bear no relation to the perceived slight. I have no objection to the terms "denylist" or "excludelist", but "blacklist" also seems perfectly fine when used in a technical context.
In much the same way, the terms above could all be replaced as well:
* White bread -> Plain bread
* White noise -> Full-spectrum noise
* Brown-noser -> Suck-up
* Yellow journalism -> Sensationalist journalism
* Black comedy -> Taboo-related comedy
If one wanted to use any of the terms on the right, I'd be more than happy to read them (just as I'm happy to read "blocklist" or "excludelist"). It does not follow, though, that I should stop using the terms on the left -- the fact that someone might be offended if they assume that the phrase is racially motivated (especially if it conforms to other racial prejudices they've experienced) is definitely terrible for that person. The solution, though, is to make it clear that such phrases are not racially motivated, rather than to assume that such terms are implicitly racialized.
tl;dr: There are lots of phrases, across different groups that could be offensive if they were assumed to be related to that group's identity, but which aren't actually related. We could choose to remove these phrases from our vocabulary, or we could clarify when terms refer to extremely long-standing color associations vs. when they refer to racial concepts that use the same language. I have no qualms with people that choose to do the former, but I see no reason to be any less okay with people that choose to do the latter.
And even if that’s true, why should iorate, a Japanese developer, give a single damn about that? The world is way bigger than the U.S. A few countries’ names can’t even be mentioned without offending certain American sensibilities. Stop exporting this bullshit please.
Is there any extension which would add all the sites i want to block to google's exclude filter? So the first page has really only interesting results and not none. Like "some js problem -inurl:code-examples.net -inurl:qastack.com.de [...]"
I had been using Personal Blocklist by Google for years and then its community fork. This seems much nicer.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
I'll certainly give this a go.
The killer feature would be if you could do something about Google News. The difficulty here is Google News mangles all the links into something like:
https://news.google.com/articles/CBMijwFodHRwczovL3d3dy5wcmV...
The counter-part feature (domain boost) is also available.
Are they sleeping with the directors of Bing and Google Search to be allowed to do that, or do they use one of these shady companies that proxy google search through hacked computers ?
The Bing one wants you to write Bing©®™ everywhere, requires you to track your user with their trackers, and forbids most features that would make an alternative search engine useful, such as sorting or filtering the results. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/bing-web-search-ap...
AWESOME!
this is literally the end of the web. (day of the spider predator animal)
I'm curious about what other people on HN are blocking. I find myself searching a lot about upcoming video games or Apple products and I was quite sick of seeing all of the same SEOed-to-death clickbait nonsense.
Amazing!
Submitted title was "Ublacklist – the missing button on Google search, IMO". Submitters: please don't do that. It's against the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html