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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

This is such a great idea, and a mystery as to why no search engine has dared to put it on their engine. Care to enlighten me?

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It hurts Google to allow the product to choose what customers have access to it.

Extend this to map search - If only I could exclude all starbucks, 7/11, even Denny's from my map searches for 'coffee shop'. No hate to those who like the coffee from there, but I want a proper coffee shop and if I could filter out certain chains, I would do it in a caffeinated heartbeat. This applies to not just Google maps though.

Maybe Google will make you to be able to exclude white men owned businesses in your map searches but excluding brands is not something they seem willing to do

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.

>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

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!

This frustrates me to no end. Usually, I search for "independent coffee shop" to narrow results, but then still have to zoom in until my nose is touching the pavement before I can see anything other than large chains. Even worse, if there aren't enough "popular" results, I'll get things that are very much not coffee shops, like Target or Arby's

At least you can -exclude those names. Gas station convenience stores come up for "grocery store" searches, yet they're all named differently.

Google maps doesn't seem to support `-exclude` like Google/DDG search does.

You're right. I noticed this on Bing Maps before, but hadn't noticed Google following suit.

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.

This would be an interesting app to build on OpenStreetMap data.

To add to this...

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?

This is a great, pithy expression for exactly what is driving the toxic behavior--nicely phrased.

Amazing phrasing.

I see what you did there ;)

Every time I end up on the pinterest from google, I hit back. Google knows that, but it will still show me pinterest as the top result.

It used to be built into Google. I was just telling someone that Google has been down hill since they removed it, and they were so young they didn't remember it being there.

google used to have the personal blocklist extension

not sure what happened to it...

Yes, Google used to have this feature. I was probably one of the tiny percentage of the users who used it. My guess is it's one of those features where very few people used it. So the cost of maintaining a feature like this on a scale like Google search with tiny percentage of users is not worth it.

I think it was a stop gap solution because Google was overrun with spam sites, like Expert Village, before Google did the Panda update.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

It's still a huge problem. Try searching for a product or product category. For example, search for "best winter coat" on Google. Half the sites are low quality affiliate link farms who don't know anything more about the product than what's in their Amazon description.

Those sites are so annoying. I want some know-it-all moms on a forum telling eachother what to buy - not scam sites pretending to review stuff.

Some years ago I got moms. Nowadays Google seems to serve crap.

These days I just search Reddit to get real people's opinions on a product. Way more trustworthy than Amazon reviews or random blogs.

The URLs usually have a certain smell to them as well. "bestcoat.com", "topreviewsz", "theexpertreport2021.net" etc.

CHECK PRICE ON AMAZON CHECK PRICE ON AMAZON CHECK PRICE ON AMAZON

Isn't that still an issue? For some of the obscure searches I'm still seeing sites that copy content from github/stackoverflow/reddit

Yep! It was called “personal blocklist (by google)”.

I don’t think anyone was maintaining it. So when the SERP changed its layout, the extension broke and Google removed it :(

What do you mean it broke? I am using it as we speak and it still blocks great

Most likely because extremely low number of people (by Google's definition) would use it and there are other things to prioritize.

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").

Google actually did use to have this functionality. They almost certainly removed it because it hurts profits (an advertising company that allows it's targets to define content?).

I've been using this extension for a good while now, and it's probably saved me a stroke or two.

Are you paying for Google search? No. So, its not in Google's interest to do what's best for the enduser (to an extent, after which it hurts them as user engagement dwindles and people move to another search engine).

Yes, you are paying.

You can do it without an add-on.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews+-site%3Anews.ycom...

They mean no way to have a persistent black list you don’t have to set every search.

Couldn't you do this with Chrome search engines?

https://zapier.com/blog/add-search-engine-to-chrome/

i suspect google does not support user configurable spam filtering because spam filtering is one of their big value adds. their job is to return relevant and spam free results in a user friendly manner. if they made client side filtering a thing, and it allowed their spam filtering efforts to shrink because "the users can always filter it themselves" then their overall product would suffer. i imagine also it's a matter of internal pride, if they do their job correctly, you shouldn't need it.

Doubt it, it's more likely that they want to maintain full control over results. They likely have certain results they don't want you to filter. Also, relevance can change over time. You might filter out something now that made sense to filter out now but not in the future after the site changed and got reindexed.

right, their value proposition to you, as a user of their search engine, is that if you type in a few terms they'll present a carefully curated list of locations on the internet that are not only relevant to your search terms but also are useful to you, specifically, at that moment.

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.

'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?

It was a major feature of blekko's search engine.

Google had it for a while, too.

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