uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results | Hacker News Reader

uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Google search results

github.com

543 pointssanketpatrikar313 comments

I've posted this before, but you can achieve the same with uBlock Origin static filters alone without having to install any additional extensions. For example:

To block results from specific domains on Google or DDG:

    google.*##.g:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"])
    duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"])

And it's even possible to target an element's text content with a `:has-text(/regex/)` selector:

    google.*##.g:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i))
    duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i))

As a bonus, here's how to get rid of Medium's obnoxious cookie notification across all domains:

    *##body > div > div:has(*:has-text(/To make Medium work.*Privacy Policy.*Cookie Policy/i))

Having a button to remove the offending site right from the search results saves quite a bit of time, so while i usually prefer not to have extra extensions, i see a lot of utility here.

Same reason why I still use uMatrix in addition to uBlock even though custom rules in the latter are not any less powerful - user interface matters.

Exactly! i often wish the umatrix UI was just merged into ublock origin as an optional tool.

Wasn’t it though? Just click the “I’m an advanced user” button in the uBlock Origin options. Then you get the per-domain block details in the uBlock Origin extension button just like uMatrix.

Per domain, but not per feature. Matrix let you specify whether to block images, cookies, script, etc for each domain from the UI.

How often does one want to individually allow specific 3rd-party cookies+images? uBlock already allows control over specific 3rd party scripts.

Often, which is why people like me still use uMatrix.

I still think Adblock Plus has superior UI than uBlock Origin, despite hasn't been using it for years.

uBlock is a great blocker, but an absolutely garbage UI. Luckily the on/off button + 'Element Blocker' context menu entry do most of what I want without having to yet again try to decipher its cryptic icons.

I like ublock origin's UI. Its one of the best extension UI's Ive used. Simple and clear. It's bare bones for power users and I guess that makes it inaccessible, calling it garbage seems like overkill.

It's not clear though. I still have no idea what these columns mean, despite have been actively learning about them multiple times (as in, I have to re-learn every time I need to use them). They don't even have tooltips.

A good UI should be self-explanatory, this is not even close.

Does that include uMatrix on iOS or Android OS.

This was supposed to be a trick question. I do not think uMatrix is available for a mobile OS.

Not denying that. However, unless I'd be blocking new domains on a weekly basis, I just don't think it's worth installing an additional extension for something that's so easily achieved without.

I mean I definitely would be: I block YouTube channels pretty aggressively now, and there's a lot of websites I'd like to get rid of.

I've started blocking results using ublock last year after it has been mentioned here, and I've got to the point where I have a script I can use to generate the relevant filters for google/bing and a few other search engines.

When I spot any domain which has been squatted by SEO and useless comparison-alike websites I immediately block it. This has brought up the quality of results IMMENSELY.

I'm blocking domains on a _daily_ basis.

The interesting thing is that Google could do this easily if they wanted to, but for some reason they don't. After all, if you can do it as an end user and in a low enough amount of time that it is worth it for you then surely Google can do it, they get to amortize that time across many more users.

They actually used to offer this feature years ago but removed it.

Yes. I remember that feature. I was displeased when I noticed that it had been removed.

Google in general has an aversion to giving users control. Their product vision is an omniscient AI that gives you enough of what you want that you'll tolerate the ads. The removal of user control is aided in many cases by justifications around security and UX design simplicity ("users don't know what they want"). But really it's about keeping control on the AI side.

I concur.

I suppose eventually Google's search results in many countries/jurisdictions (such as the EU, USA, etc) will be regulated like a public utility.

As a result, I expect Google will be forced to allow users to ban search results from particular URLs with a single click.

Hey, could you post a gist? I'm currently using uBlacklist to block exactly that type of shitty site you mention.

Would you mind sharing your script? I'd be glad to use it.

…have you used Google lately? I’m blocking junk results daily.

Been using this method to build on my blocklist for a few years, it's quite long by now ;)

Any chance of sharing it?

That’s the ticket. “Many intelligent people go out of their way to silence this site” is EXACTLY the kind of signal I want to pump into my information retrieval system.

Should be possible to crowd source this and publish the result as a list that’s consumed by uBlock origin…

That would be awesome.

I've found one other immediate and huge improvement to my mood was to remove all graphical elements from the news sites that I visit.

Yes, please! But I guess we'd need some form of web of trust?

There's too much personal stuff on there for me to be comfortable sharing it as is, and I'm afraid I don't have time to distil the list this weekend either.

I'd be happy to create you some ready-made filters for any specific sites or other types of results that you'd like to get rid of though, just let me know!

No, no problem, if it is just for me, I figured that if this can be crowdsourced effectively it would really clean up the search results and that is worth it if enough people start using it.

It might even be enough to stick it on github or gitlab and start accepting pull requests against a starter list.

Edit: Apparently someone is already doing something similar to what I described below. Please see... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31694164

I suppose a simple bash script triggered with a hotkey could essentially circumvent your need to install uBlacklist.

I'm imagining the steps as follows...

1. Select the text of the URL you want uBlock Origin to eliminate (such as, AWebSiteIDoNotLike.com) from the Google search results you see.

2. Press your hotkey (say, Ctrl+F5 or Alt+F9).

3. The script appends the necessary text to my-ublock-static-filters_date_goes_here.txt

Is it possible to block/hide "People Also Search For" boxes in Google search results? It's annoying because each time you go back to search results, this little box re-aligns the whole list of results so you can't quickly click on the next search result.

This should do:

    google.*###search > div > div > div:has(span:has-text(/People also ask/))

This works!

This is the worst. I always click it on accident. Glad I'm not the only one going crazy... if it can't load at first, then don't load it at all

can you do an example for blocking pinterest?

Sure, unclear which type of search you meant so here's both.

Regular search:

    google.*##.g:has(a[href*="pinterest.com"])

Image search:

    google.*##.isv-r:has-text(pinterest.)

Edit: Simplified the image search variant a bit.

Amen. Pinterest is such a pathetic spambucket.

Is there a way to get rid of results with listicle titles like "8 Best Toasters to Buy in 2022"?

If you could come up with a suitable regex for the title structures you want to block then you can feed that to :has-text() instead of a raw string.

Yesssss, thank you so much!! Goodbye quora, stackshare, slant, etc. Finally.

I really like this solution, but FYI it blocks suffixes, adding gram.com blocks instagram.com, facebookgram.com, etc.

Check out this guide on attribute selectors on MDN for some options to finetune: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Attribute_s...

Alternatively, you could stop using Google and use Kagi (https://kagi.com), which offers the same feature. :)

Being using it through the beta and moved toward their annual subscription :)

Also you can give more importance to some website in the search result, create your own search template.

It's so feature rich, and to make things easier they provide and extension to set your default search engine for you.

I was considering subscribing to Kagi but $10/month is almost as expensive as my fiber broadband connection and I don't think I can justify this expense. I would likely subscribe if it was $5/month.

I thought the same at first. Then I thought on an annual budget and price.

Does Kagi worth $120 per year for me ? Yes, yes it does, it's barely nothing compared to the value of having proper search result. I checked ... I make more than 50 searches per day...

$120 yearly is nothing compared to other expenses that I have like my broadband internet around $70 per month for it...

My thought process was like that: i do 50 searches per day, i lose on average 3 seconds per search filtering ads, pinterest,quota,geekforgeek,etc. results. This means 150 second or 3 minutes a day. Which means 1.5 hours a month. My hourly rate is about $70 USD, so paying $10 to give me back $100 of my time seemed like a good deal.

I have yet to find any competitor which provides its own results and is even 50% as good as Google's results.

Features are nice, but for a search engine results are everything.

Kagi is even better than Google in my opinion. I’m still thinking whether I want to pay a subscription for it but it’s tempting since the results are so good. M

When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time as I wasnt happy with the results, especially local such as finding a specific shop in my area etc. I dont recall using g! with Kagi, and when I was bored and compared the Kagi search result with Google to see if I was missing out, it turned to be the other way - I realised I was actually getting a much wider spectrum of results. I discovered many cool websites and blogs I never knew excited thanks to it or rather thanks to the fact that they show you what’s relevant to your search unlike Google that shows what they think is.

To me Kagi also feels way better than google. I am paying for the service.

> When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time

lol, I did the exact same thing! After a month of that, I just went back to Google :(. Google's results are just so damn good.

That was me a couple of years ago, I've tried DDG every year since it was announced on HN as a project. Google got worse and DDG got better, I use DDG mostly now (also Kagi and Brave, Google, and very occasionally Bing).

Try !s for Startpage when DDG doesn't have what you want. Startpage uses Google's index and is quite good. DDG and StartPage together give me more (and higher quality results) without Google's obnoxiously deceptive ads.

I've had the same experience. Maybe it's my developer bubble, but Kagi has better search results than Google for me.

Ha! I'm the opposite. When I use someone else's computer, I get confused because the results are all crap, then I have to manually type duckduckgo.com into their URL bar.

At least Google Search has started blocking itself with a consent wall on new devices. It's the best feature from them in a while, at least for me. I wish their tracking stuff was opt in too.

Kagi is honestly not good at all about local results. I use !g the most often when trying to find information about stores or restaurants. For all other "encyclopedic" knowledge, like Wikipedia (pinned), Stack Exchange, blogs, etc., Kagi has way less SEO spam than Google.

We haven't rolled out our local results yet. It is work in progress, ETA 2 weeks to shipping first version.

By local I meant like when I’m searching for Adidas trainers or garden fence panels it will bring up shops that sell it in UK and a lot of them are local as they have physical shop in my location. With DDG I was getting shops from America even when I had UK setting switched on. For example tool shops like Screwfix or Toolstation never came up in DDG whereas Kagi shows them on first page.

I didnt mean like places to eat near me etc. sorry. Not something I really do to be honest.

From reading the site it seems like Kagi uses Google on the backend, so it's probably privacy, filtering and presentation you're paying for.

Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.

A lot of people seem surprisingly happy with Kagi's results but I would like to put my hand up as someone who is, so far, underwhelmed and occasionally frustrated. I realise I've started automatically starting almost all of my searches with the prefix to search via Google instead. I recently reinstalled my desktop OS and I've been happily delaying configuring Kagi as my default browser search.

It's slower, sometimes painfully so (maybe due to downtime? Understandable but not fun). I really miss Google's cards; for example, finding opening hours for a local business is immediate in Google, but requires opening another link which may not even be correct in Kagi. When I'm searching errors or code examples, sometimes Kagi embeds a useless snippet with little relevance. Sometimes it has a bizarre 'memory effect' where one or two of the results will be ghosts from an earlier search but completely unrelated to the current search term.

It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.

Kagi does not have local search results (yet).

Speed is on average faster than Google for most users, so if that is not the case for you please let us know via https://kagifeedback.org

And if there is any kind of bug, glitch or issue please also use kagifeedback.org

> It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.

If is far from perfect. I would say we are 30% through what our vision for the product looks like. I can totally understand how it does not meet your expectation right now.

The beauty of our model is that people pay with their wallets, not their data, and the momemt the product sucks, we lose a customer (or don't get one like in your case). Incentives are perfectly aligned.

The fact that barely a week afer the public beta launch, over a thousand people already pay for Kagi, while still being in beta and (very) rough around the edges, is the greatest motivation we can have to serve our user community well and continuing improving the product in the future.

HN crowd for all their smartness are as ego-driven and as susceptible to human biases like everyone else.

Most opinions come from an irrational hate towards Google. (It's the nerd equivalent to be edgy/hip among peers by hating something popular).

Then there is sunk cost fallacy, like I pay $10, it must be good. It's not Google, it must be good (never mind that the founders of all these companies are all cut from the same silicon valley cloth and are equally good/evil/shades of grey)

Finally, it's the illusion of "Feel Good factors" -- Privacy, David vs Goliath

Beat me to it!

Kagi also goes one step further and allows you to "pin" sites to the top. For example, I've got MDN pinned, so whenever I'm searching for web stuff they're the top result, even if there's an SEO'd blog post that normally would have come first.

Abandoning Google is a huge motivator for me, but this feature set is why it's my primary search engine. Google tries to guess what I want and just ends up feeding me the same garbage it feeds everyone else. Kagi allows me to correct it when it guesses wrong. That makes all the difference.

I used to just download the MDN docs to my computer so I can search locally. Offline search beats everything. You don't need the Internet to search.

Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?

I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.

But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side.

At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed.

One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)

Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.

> I'm either overpaying

The company is aiming to have many users that everyone is overpaying with their $10, so that they make money, thanks to the reduced marginal cost. And the company hopes that the $10 is low enough that enough everyone knows they are overpaying they are still willing.

From their usage panel, I do 50-200 research per day. In 10 days my usage cost is estimated at 11.69$. It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge.

> It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi.

Correction: they're saying 80 searches cost them ~1$.

>Why does Kagi cost $10/month?

>Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.

>Someone searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3. An average Kagi beta user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal due to testing etc.

>Our goal is to find the minimum price at which we can sustain the business. If it turns out that we have more room we will decrease it. But it can also be that we may need to increase it.

>The free plan will be limited to 50 searches a month (and this too has to be paid by paying customers which makes the above math even harder).

How... do 80 searches cost them a dollar? That seems insanely high unless they're counting fixed costs that'll go down fast (on a per-search basis) as they get more subscribers.

8,000 searches costing a dollar, in actual resource use? OK, maybe. Still seems a little high, but maybe. 80? Are they paying someone to manually look things up for you?

Perhaps amortizing really high salaries. $1M/month for a chief metrics officer or something.

Kagi is completely bootstrapped. It has basically 10 developers and me doing everything else. No managers. The expense is low as humanely possible as still coming out of my own pocket.

I admire kagi a lot and will eventually pay you.

You don’t have to answer, but how do you have such a high per search price?

It is the cost of commercial APIs that we use. We can't get volume discounts because we dont have volume, not are ever likely to have volume similar to free search engines.

I'd challenge that the cost per search is actually very low. For just 1.25 cents, you can search the entire world wide web with any query, find what you need with no distractions and all that in just 500ms. The value of that search outcome for you can be $10 or even $100. It is probably the most amazing return on investment existing in the world today. Imagine for a second that Google and other search engine didn't exist, and someone offered you this deal today. I'd be you'd take it in a hearbeat. Heck you may even consider paying $1 per search or even $5. So the value is there.

But today this value is anchored in the price of 'free' search. So instead $1 per search sounding like a good deal, we struggle to accept that 1.25 cents is.

We hope that for a portion of people that 1.25 cents per search is going to sound like an amazing deal, especially as this is the only search relationship where the incentives of the information provider are aligned with the incentives of the information consumer.

While I agree that it probably have a lot of value, the issues is human brains.

I don't feel 1 cents per search is a good deal at all, while -logically- it probably will give me more than 1 cent of value out of it. People never thought about how much the knowledge they acquired is worth, most of the time they share it free of charge, people like to share, somes will even pay hosting to share knowledge !

That's why I don't believe in the pay-as-you-go I'm fine with a subscription, I don't pay to have more value out of my search, but because: 1. I dont like ads, I want to support an ad free alternative.

2. I pay for my privacy.

3. Better results will mean less time lost on searching, less frustration.

I never accounted the value I will get out of better search, I looked at the price and felt that I was a bit overpriced for my taste, but I want an ad-free, pro privacy internet.

I didn’t know Kagi was bootstrapped. As a fellow bootstrapper, it makes me like Kagi even more. Good luck in the future. I think you really have something here so I hope the monetization strategy works.

It's new software, features are always prioritized over cost efficency at the beginning when pressure to ship product overrides all.

I think I remember somewhere that they said a very high percentage of searches are totally unique i.e. never queried before thus not served from cache. I don't think they reword searches like Google does for a higher cache hit rate.

I never thought about that. That could explain a lot. Although I also recall Google themselves saying a lot of their queries are totally unique anyway.

> Although I also recall Google themselves saying a lot of their queries are totally unique anyway.

Which is probably why search quality is going down. They're rewriting your query to a more common way of saying the same thing, at least according to Google.

From Kagi usage panel:

Date-search count-generated cost

>Jun 10, 2022 90 $1.12

They show conflicting numbers.

> I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge.

Sure, but this whole adventure won't last very long if the company loses money even on paying customers. If your usage costs them about $30 a month but you only pay $10, who will pay the remaining $20? Someone has to finance your access to knowledge in the end...

No, it's industry standard to operate at a deficit to gain userbase and subscriptions. They're certainly prioritizing shipping product right now over reducing COGS, but you can bet that if they're successful in the short-term that in a couple years they'll be able to significantly reduce cost per search.

Correct, we are betting that avg user will cost us less than $10 in the future. Our current userbase is skewing towards HN - heavy usage. If that does not happen, we will have to change the price. Cost per search is unlikely to (significantly) change without (significantly) jeopardizing the quality of results we are known for.

Most of my queries through the day aim a few hundred of website - programming docs- I wouldn't mind if Kagi automatically chose my lenses(current one are too limited) if it reduce research cost.

A lot of services operate like that. France ISP offer unlimited data with very low price, because they know the average usage, and I'm perfectly fine with that.

You'll get used to it. Of course you won't limit your access to knowledge just to save $20 monthly.

How much does it cost to have a suboptimal search experience 50-200 times every day? Saving 5 seconds (on average) per search, that's something like $10 per day in savings (provided you search during work hours).

Sorry, how did you find that usage panel? I'm on my phone and I'm just not seeing it.

Nevermind. Looks like you have to have a subscription to see usage stats.

https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption

Yeah, $10 is steep, but I feel like I'd be happy with a bundle deal. Search, reliable email, a small bit of storage, and other small services for $20 or $30. I'm sure I'm underestimating how much I use search, but it just doesn't feel like an essential part of my life that I'd want to pay that much.

I'd honestly rather see Kagi focus entirely on search and not try to branch out too much. These days, I think startups try to chew up too many markets at once instead of really honing in on one.

100% agree. Maybe I'm missing something but where's the synergy between search and email + storage unless you're harvesting data?

The synergy is in the fact that email and storage are high margin products. We are currently basically losing money on search. Cost of providing email per user is negligible (compared to search) but you could double the price and make the economics work.

As someone who prefers to search in private tabs, I was wondering why do I need to create an account, until I saw the pricing. It's an interesting conundrum, either you search anonymously with bloat and ads, or have your activity pinned to your account maybe with ads, or guaranteed without ads for $10/month.

As much as it bothers me, I'd prefer to work around the first option.

they now have a browser plugin that allows search in private tabs

All searches are logged to your account which is tied to your credit card / kpi.

They are not. See kagi.com/privacy

They promise never ever to share your confidential info, but that promise wouldn't be necessary if they didn't have it in the first place.

I understand they need it for customization and monetization, but search queries are too private to ask for trust.

I'd love if more services worked this way. Same for streaming, YouTube etc.

Pay per use is a great model for search and I wish we could use it. But I don”t think the world is ready yet.

In our survey 90% of users told us they preffered fixed fee over pay per use and feedback we got was that pay per use would make them anxious to use search. Also it adds additional friction in the signup flow (where the idea of paid search is already a novelty and then pay per search?) and so we decided to go with a fixed monthly price.

Sweet spot would be $15-$20/month but this way we would not have enough users, and less users equals leas feedback to build product. Our pricing is subject to a change, we had to launch with a price and we’ve chosen one that was good compromise.

We are likely to introduce pay per use first in our enterprise plan. Pricing Kagi is an extremely difficult intelectual challenege. (Kagi founder here)

Maybe you could do something similar to Google Fi's pricing model for data usage. You pick a monthly amount of data, say 2GB, for a monthly price of $40. Any GB you use in excess of that is $10 per GB up to a maximum of $80, and data usage is unlimited after that.

I would bet that my usage most months would not exceed $5, and I think many other prospective users would be willing to gamble on that as well. Food for thought.

Too bad a pay-per-search model was not adopted. But would it be a big trouble to let users choose?

* Say 1 search is 5 cents. So unless a person searched less than 200 times a month, the pay-per-search is cheaper....

* Or why not adopt the model where you pay 5 cents per search _for the first 200 searched_ and nothing afterwards (so the ceiling is $10 per month)?

Relevant Tweet: https://twitter.com/janhodl3/status/1535530318987509761

Does it support IE6? (Google does, and it's a browser I enjoy using.)

for those who need a double scoop of agencies to go with their agency.

Why would anyone support a deprecated browser?

Because customers like it and they want to retain or attract those customers. (Basically the same reason any company does anything)

Is this the next iteration of the "I browse with javascript disabled" HN comment?

We didn’t try yet but Kagi works the same with JS disabled. JS is there to enhance UX, not create it.

Let us know.

That is a good start!

Landing page : signup or login

No thank you

I started using it a couple of weeks ago, absolutely love it. I haven't gone back to google a single time yet.

I see people complain about a price, but I suspect also they complain about being tracked by google. I guess you can pick your poison. I think I'd rather pay a few bucks a month at this point, but to each his own.

There are other, better, free options. See my comment above. Startpage + GHHBD.

...or use Grease/Tamper/Violent- monkey and the excellent Google Hit Hider by Domain[0] --which is free and [in spite of the name] works across all major search engines.

I feel like an evangelist for this script as I seem to mention it on an almost monthly basis here. But, as the saying goes "No connection. Just a happy user."

PS: as I said last time 'uBlacklist' was promoted here; whatever the merits of your product, trying to subconsciously associate yourself with the excellent 'uBlock Origin', by using a similar naming convention, is very shady.

PPS: reading the rest of the comments, I'm amazed at the number of people saying they've signed up for this, or intend to. $10 a month for something you could have for free --and we're supposed to be in recessionary times. It's true what they say about 'a fool and his money...'

[0] https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

About your PPS: I search from my own machine, from my work laptop, and from my phone. I also use different browsers. Maintaining a user script to “undo” crap results won’t work well in this scenario. Having those settings saved in the search engine itself is really nice!

I’m a paying Kagi user now, and this isn’t my first comment gushing over that product. :)

You’re joking right? We’re on a forum where a good chunk of the people commenting have 6-figure salaries, some on the very high side of that. And some here have a lot more money than that.

$10/mo for something used many times every day is a drop in the bucket for many. It’s not true for all, but for many.

It’s not the amount. It’s the value for me.

$10 for something that is minimal value is the path to ruin, especially when done by many people.

There’s opportunity cost (ie, what if I donated to charity, etc) but mainly I want to support high value products with some link to costs. All these “just the price of coffee” 4-hour-work-week type things are an unhealthy way of looking at the world.

I like open source so I can stop worrying about stuff that has near zero marginal costs.

I hate to think of a future where everything I enjoy or use is “just $10 every month.”

To each their own. But to me, a search engine is a very high value tool.

Paid search means that the service is not incentivized to appeal to advertisers. Disclaimer: happy Kagi subscriber here :)

GHH just removes the results from the list, it doesn't add anything. I don't see how it could appeal to advertisers. EDIT: Oh, you're talking about Kagi. Gotcha.

Also an avid user of GHH. It's excellent. Configurable, easy to export/import, and free.

Wow it costs them 1c per search to service your request!

Just tried the first example search "best laptop" and results are not really very useful - usually old content and none of the results showed the publishing dates of the articles. https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop

What are the ideal results for “best laptop”?

This is for sure a really hard question to answer, but I think we can agree that a 2017 blog post does not constitute the “idea results” for this query, no?

FWIW I was a beta tester, and (mostly) enjoyed my experience, but having this as a demo of Kagi’s abilities on your splash page does not inspire confidence in the product IMO.

There are two schools of thought on how to answer this query:

Here is #1 result on Google: https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best...

Here is #1 result on Kagi: https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever

Kagi's result showcases our philosophy of preferring non-commercial content to commercial/SEO/affiliate content. It may not be for everyone. If the users want that they can find the same link as Google's #1 in a section called listicles.

We show this example on purpose so that we manage expectations on what you will get Kagi from the very first interaction.

I need to get around to signing up. I started a couple weeks back, but stalled about some question re: what search means to you, or something like that, went off for a while to think about it, and never went back.

Guess I need to just write "finding stuff" or something trite and get on with it.

(don't ask me open-ended questions as part of a signup process unless you want me to brain-lock and never finish the form :-) Though I just checked and it looks like the signup flow's very different and more normal now, so that's good)

You probably had to answer questions during their closed beta, so they could look for and invite specific user types as they ramped up. As of last week, IIRC, they're now in open beta. That could explain why their sign up flow changed.

Makes sense. I wasn't mad about it or anything, just noticed that it had that effect on me, and was like, "huh, weird". The three or four times I'd thought about going back, remembering that was there had stopped me, too ("eh, I don't want to get started and just end up abandoning it again, waste of time") until checking again after reading this thread.

I've tried Kagi a few times, but the results were not better than qwant.com (which is quite comparable to DuckDuckGo and Brave).

Except Qwant and Brave are their own search engines, unlike DuckDuckGo who sources Bing. The first two add diversity to the search engine industry.

The results have been fine for me, the date filtering and archive.org results in particular have been really helpful. And as an FYI, Kagi runs their own web crawler, but also sources from Google & Bing.

https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from

Of course, I'm biased as I was a beta tester and now a subscriber, hoping they succeed.

It is great, I used it during their early-access, but the 10/month is a bit steep tbh. I would be more inclined to pay up at <5/month. One of my favourite features was the toggle for showing results only from discussion boards.

$1-2 per month would be worth it for me. But $10 per month just for search - no, it is not, sorry.

Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like a great service and I'd love to support them, but as a student I just can't justify $10/month as long as Google with an adblocker is still an okay experience. Credit card being the only payment option is another problem, since I (like most people where I live) only have a debit card, with credit cards usually costing extra. I'll definitely keep an eye on kagi though, hoping for more payment options and a <$5 subscription.

Kagi accepts debit cards.

It depends on the kind of debit card apparently. What I have is a girocard[1], which doesn't have the required 16 digit card number and CVC. I didn't even know that debit cards can have those. My online payments are usually made via SEPA bank transfers, Giropay[2] or Paypal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard

[2] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/giropay

Paypal support coming soon!

uBlacklist is actually better than Kagi for a multitude of reasons.

http://len.falken.directory/web/overall-disappointed-in-kagi...

Expresses it a bit better...

I've been using Kagi for almost two months and I absolutely love it. Well worth the $10/mo they started charging a couple weeks ago.

I tried Kagi a month ago, compared about 20 queries to Google, and all of them were either equal or worse on Kagi compared to Google.

Also showing the date on reddit threads was either broken or not there.

I signed up for Kagi during the closed beta, and used it for a bit. But I kept going back to Google for some searches, the proportion of which was steadily increasing over time, until almost unconsciously I was tabbing down to "search with Google" every time I searched. At that point I figured it was a revealed preference and went back to Google.

I'm using uBlacklist plus these two blacklists that block out spam sites that clone pages from Stack Overflow and Github.

https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio... https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation

You can also import these lists in uBlock Origin's filters and use one fewer extension.

Shameless plug for the blacklist I maintain: https://github.com/franga2000/aliexpress-fake-sites

Anyone who has tried to buy something obscure locally will probably find this useful. There are hundreds of fake webstores that pretend to be in different countries (using national TLDs and machine translation), then just redirect you to AliExpress. I have a script that can recognise them and add them to this blocklist.

The ironic thing is, those sites you block have most likely cloned your github page and published blocklists for themselves on their own site.

Years ago, I made a FireFox addon for myself to do exactly this but everywhere on the internet. You specify a regular express to match attribute values and/or text, and the CSS to apply to the elements containing the matches. You can specify any CSS you want but if it's something like visibility: hidden or display: none it has this effect (and is the only thing I've actually used it for). It even worked on FireFox for Android when that supported proper addons.

It's really nice to never see a link to Facebook, Twitter, etc anywhere on the internet. It's almost like they don't exist. It causes a few oddities here and there (The text matching is problematic but it's optional, the attribute value matching works really well), but I've never missed anything important. I feel like if everyone had this power everywhere, it would serve as incentive for sites to not suck.

It took some fun javascript APIs I've never had to use before (like MutationObserver and TreeWalker) to get it to work right and efficiently, especially on sites that load content via JS (like Google).

Source: https://github.com/7w0/ssure (the interesting bits are in content.js)

Addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ssure/

Finally I can get rid of those deadend Pinterest results...

Edit. And quora

There is also a privacy respecting frontend for Quora which removes the bloat

https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends#quor...

Privacy is important, but in this particular case I just want to hide low quality search results.

You can use something like this to get rid of their millions of domains.

/.pinterest.\../

/.dreamstime.\../

/.depositphotos.\../

/.gettyimages.\../

and whatever else you (don't) want.

Or get rid of specific TLDs in your search results.

/.\.(porn|casino|xxx|zone)\/(.*)/

Seems like you didn't properly escape some of your asterisks.

Well, tell HN to add a proper code formatting option!

I specifically installed this extension for Quora some time ago.

To take the best advantage of this, you want to crank up the results per page setting in the search engine. This is because the deletions simply cut results form each page without the results being repaginated.

I made a lot of use of uBlacklist; but then I found Huawei's petalsearch.com, where pretty much none of the crap that I deleted appears in the first place.

uBlacklist is really just a band-aid solution for a garbage search engine; it doesn't address the root cause.

probably won't get any of those pesky results critical of the chinese government, either

So you might think.

But I just tried the search terms "tiananmen square massacre" in PetalSearch. It comes up with the Wikipedia page on the subject, just like Google does.

The second result in PetalSearch points to the rationalwiki, whose text begins "The Tiananmen Square Massacre was a ruthless crackdown on a pro-democracy protest ..."; and that is quoted in the search result.

The next results after that are news items about Chinese censorship:

"China censors tank-shaped Viennetta ice cream on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre"

"China Censors Top Livestreamer, Fans Question Potential Link To Tiananmen Square Massacre Reference"

and others.

Seems all right to me.

Of course, I'm not able to repeat this test from within China; but how would Google and others fare there?

Great now I will be able to never see quora.com again

I'd argue all Q&A services devolve into madness when they get mainstream.

Before Quora we had yahoo answer and before that surely something else.

As soon as they get mainstream the quality of question and answer goes down. Those systems only work with well defined constraints either on the subject of the question or the validation of the expertise of the people answering.

All of those platform just open the valve with close to no moderation. We can see the same with Reddit and big sub Reddit.

This is largely platform’s fault though. Quora had every opportunity to stop site spammers from posting non-informative answers just to farm clicks for the blog posts they link to for the “full” answer.

Mind boggling that Google hasn’t penalised them since years ago.

Google didn't penalize Pinterest either. In Google image search, Pinterest results are abundant but clicking on them and viewing them requires a sign-up on Pinterest.

I still remember the good old days of Quora; it was a nice era but it's gone...

You think Quora is bad? Try blocking Pinterest from your search results. I swear those bastards have registered pinterest<dot><every-fucking-TLD-in-existence>

pinterest.lol and pinterest.pics are available today for $3 a month introductory pricing

Only $3/mo, plus $800/hr to defend against the trademark infringement lawsuit

You will know you have died and gone to hell when you can navigate to pinterest.mil.

Stackoverflow and it’s dozens of sigs seem fine. What do you think is the exception? Not mainstream?

I’d argue it’s good community policing with a carefully Maintained incentive structure.

I think stack exchange's extraordinary resistance to content deterioration is largely due to the moderation atmosphere that I would describe as something akin to a particularly pedantic police state

I love stack overflow and all but I am so sick if very old answers showing as the top result in google. no I'm not using java 6 or laravel 4 or whatever

Stack Exchange works pretty well. There is some moderation on SE, but not much IMO.

Quora is the new ExpertSexChange.com.

I only need this for W3Schools.

100% the bane of my trying to use Google for Mozilla docs.

ddg, then you have !mdn for mozilla docs

  !mdn Array sort

works like a charm, there's also !rust, !cpp, etc

Blocking pintrest from image search results is also very helpful.

Absolutely crazy how such a low quality site comes up for technical queries. Speaks volumes for how smart Google algorithm is.

I wouldn't doubt many people click W3Schools results when they see them, they're not that bad, the explanation is straightforward, and it has exercises and a REPL for immediate practice. That reinforces their ranking as useful results.

Conversely, I have no idea why Pinterest plagues everything. Does it manage to trick many people into clicking for a login form?

W3Schools is the prime example that Google does use site authority for its ranking approach. A lot of their content is thin one-liners that don’t explain the subject you’re looking an answer for.

linuxquestions dot org: Here is something pertinent to Debian Potato

Google search is so bad we need blacklists. Really says something

What does it say?

It says Google search is bad.

It says that certain sites (cough:pinterest:cough) have totally poisoned the search results and that little has been done to rectify that.

That is certainly google's fault. :)

Google lets them poison the results.

It says Google is losing the SEO war.

Yeah, google search has really gone downhill lately. It’s hard to find quality results among all of the auto generated garbage.

Here are some well-maintained filterlists for ublock-origin that remove github/stack overflow copycats from search results

https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Anything to make pinterest disappear from my search results

the biggest problem with google, for me, is their internal blacklist - nothing i can do to get them to stop censoring. this is a nice start though. still sticking with bing as the lesser of evils. i switch to google sometimes if i cant find what i want on bing (for non-controversial topics that google doesnt censor, its still the best)

You can do the same with uBlock Origin filters. But writing them manually is hard.

I use https://letsblock.it/filters to automatically generate lists of sites for the different search engines. It's been working wonderfully.

This is pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.

There are custom filters for development you can import in ublock origin targeted to remove SEO spam in Google/DDG [1]

[1] https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Does anyone know how to manage firefox extension's permission?

This extension asks permissions to "Access for my data for google.*" and optionally "Access my data for all websites". However, I don't want to give it access to the data for all websites. It is insane.

I want to have stricter permission control. For example, since I only use google and duckduckgo, I want to give this extension access for the data for google and duckduckgo.

Unfortunately the problem I most often encounter with "unwanted" search results is not isolated useless sites but when the results for anything shopping-related are multiple full pages of crappy SEO-spam results.

If anyone has tips for addressing this situation I'd be much obliged.

If any of the alternative search engines would offer this and a feature to block pages with affiliate links--like those "review" sites--I would be happy to pay for them. They need to offer ways to customize the search experience.

This only applies display:none to the bad sites which means for some queries, your entire search results might be empty

To get full results, you have to use "-site" but sadly Google limits queries to 32 words which means for a 5 word query, you can only "blacklist" up to 27 sites

My mind immediately went to uMatrix or uBlockOrigin. Just want to note that, so far as I can tell, this is not associated with the author (gorhill) of those other tools:

https://github.com/gorhill

I wonder if I'm the rare minority who doesn't mind sites like geeksforgeeks because I don't use them as authoritative reference but just to lookup/double-check syntax and/or code examples. Their information isn't great but the code snippet is right there which ironically might not be the case with sites that have dense information but are low on examples. However, when I need the gory details, I just visually skip geeksforgeeks and its ilk from the search results.

Maybe we need a enable/disable toggle in uBlocklist to cater to the above "modes" of search.

Is there a way to do something complementary to this? To curate a list of websites that have valuable information on some topic / domain, and have those results raised first?

Some search engines support this, like Kagi.

Anyone know a similar extension that works for DuckDuckGo too? (Ideally one extension that covers numerous search engines)

I've been using "Personal Blocklist(not by Google)" for Google search and is pretty good too:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

According to the README, this also works with DDG and some other search engines.

It works with duckduckgo as well, you just enable it in the options menu.

You can enable uBlacklist to work on DDG and other search engines from settings.

I've been using Google Hit Hider, a userscript, for this for years. I can import/export my list, sites can be both "banned" and "blocked", I can de-duplicate and de-www my lists if needed, etc. It's very flexible. (Despite the name, it's DDG compatible as well) It's also completely free.

What advantages does this have over Google Hit Hider?

I have been using 'personal blocklist' extension for over a year and it worked well, going to try uBlacklist now.

You can already do this if you're logged into google

I have geeksforgeeks blocked because that site is a complete pile of garbage

I am logged into google and don't see such an option. How do you achieve that?

How? I thought they did away with this feature a decade ago.

This is great, but the existing subscription lists leave a ton to desired, still. Porn for instance has huge amounts of SEO spam and yet there doesn't seem to be a list for that, which is surprising considering porn and its consumers are usually the first to adopt new tech.

Excellent, I can finally use Image Search without every single gif result being a damn video file.

And pinterest!

Yes fuck Pinterest.

uBlacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433 - Dec 2021 (294 comments)

Goodbye pinterest.

This tool is amazing. I know is simple but it has made search sooooo much better. It works on other search engines besides google as well.

Yeah I know you can do it with uBlock but having the button is much simpler.

Finally, an easy way to ban forbes and heavy.com and their clickbait.

I use https://github.com/pistom/hohser since few months with success.

Google used to allow this on its search page, but of course they couldn't have users filtering spam and trash out of their results that might cost Google a penny.

What features are offered here that aren't in the similar "Personal Blocklist (not by Google)" extension?

I like this extension but I don't use it that much because I tend to avoid Google...

Google Hit Hider (despite the name) works for non-google search engines and is free. Worth a look.

must be an Apple thing, I can't find it

It's not an apple thing. It's a userscript, available on any browser that supports extensions like Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey - so both Chrome and FF.

The name is very misleading when it is only a blocker for Google search

W3c.org

Just enabled the ios safari extension, and it works very nice on DDG

This is super cool! Thanks OP for posting this for non-techies.

you.com let's you select the sources and apps you want to see more of in the appstore you.com/apps

medium.com should be top of the list !

to be fair, there are some good articles on Medium. But I agree, most are click-baits due to Medium's partnership program.

You right and I don't like it ! :/

love the player hate the name

its too bad there isn't a way to block the nytimes on hacker news

program it yourself

this is cool. kagi has this as a built in feature

Finally an easy solution to Pinterest image spam.

Doesn't Google do this well enough already?

Not even slightly

Marvellous, I have been looking for this for a while.

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