Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonameking2026 | Hacker News Reader

nonameking2026

Allow users to blacklist sites. Share blacklisted sites. Have the option of instead of hiding blacklisted sites entirely - show them in a different column.

Have 4 different types of list.

Whitelist - highest scoring

Not listed - these websites are not ranked.

Yellowlist - show but keep in a separate column

Blacklist - don't show

https://search.brave.com/help/goggles is interesting.

View on HN

99%+ of people wouldn't use this, they would just try the search engine, see that the results suck, then stop using it.

It could be useful for power users, though.

It could work like spam filtering. Once a certain number of users have marked a site as spammy (or put it on their blacklist), it gets downranked for everyone. But jstummbillig is right. It could easily get gamed.

99%+ of people in the medical industry did not sanitize hands or equipment 100 years ago.

99%+ of people in the tech industry currently do not care to do the extra steps required for data neutrality, and privacy.

99%+ of people are lazy to the point of harming themselves and others.

1%- of people examine how the 99%+ do things and pioneer harm reduction tactics in spite of everyone constantly reminding them that no one wants their help.

99% of analogies are correct

>99%+ of people in the medical industry did not sanitize hands or equipment 100 years ago.

this isn't true. 170 years ago, maybe. handwashing became a thing in the late 1800s after Semmelweiss and Pasteur

I will adjust this analogy by 70 years in the future, just for you.

Add a thumbs up / down icon, and your average Facebook user would likely use it without knowing what it was.

More and more search engines are now giving you the option to customize search results. Brave has Goggles, You.com has thumbs up / down icon and other alternative search engines have similiar capabilites too. I have been really enjoying the ability to tailor my search to how I like it and e.g. rank reddit (although it seems like it is not liked by some folks here) higher.

why would a search engine use this for a different purpose than FB does?

20% to 40% of internet users use an adblocker depending on whose statistics you use.[1][2][3]

SEO is basically another form of advertising, so evidence suggests to me that people would use something like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#:~:text=users

[2] https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-ad-blockers/

[3] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking

A quick, entirely unrepresentative look at the user count for uBlock Origin and uBlacklist in Firefox make me somewhat less optimistic than you are. Or is there a more popular way of blocking sites from search results than uBlacklist out there, which I simply don't know about?

uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus are the most popular extensions on Firefox, with each around 5 to 5.5 million average daily users over a whole year[1].

I believe the addon page is average daily users over a week or 6 days?[2]

Firefox monthly active users (unique over 28 days) is around 200 to 210 million worldwide (26 to 22 million in the USA)[3].

It's probably wrong to compare those numbers but a very naive 200 / 28 = 7.41 million average unique users per day. 5 / 7.41 = 67% (probably wrong)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/firefoxs-most-popular-innova...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1168642

[3] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Why should we care about 99% of people? They are people who upload all their personal data to social networks agreeing to "we can do whatever we want" terms, they pay with a card, use Apple's and Microsoft's spyware (which marketing people call "telemetry") ridden operating systems, and install Chrome that sends a signal to Google every time they open a new tab and sends data about every form on every website they visit (which Google developers call "crowdsourcing" in the code [1]).

Make a customizable and privacy-respecting search for us, power users.

Also, I have noticed that Firefox internal search works good for sites you had visited. So when I want to visit a page I have seen earlier, I can go straight to it skipping Google.

Also, you can click on any search box and add it with a prefix, so that you can search MDN or Wikipedia directly, again, without informing Google.

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...

I love how this is a problem that a huge number of people have worked on for around 20 years and have thrown stupid amounts of money at and people just jump in and boldly proclaim that they have the answers that just popped into their mind. Peak HackerNews.

I don’t think these ideas just popped into his mind. They’ve been discussed for a long time on HN, and some alternative search engines have started to incorporate them.

It’s worth the experiment.

But a company like Google would want supreme control. They're not inclined to rely on a community for anything

Wikipedia shows it can work at scale.

Google have actually followed a similar model for like ten years now with like 10,000 temp workers following this 172 manual to essentially as the basis to train a lot of their ranking models.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

Gmail's spam filter is basically community trained by people clicking spam/not spam (at least, that was what they said many years ago, it might have silently changed). What's different about search?

spam filter isn't their key flagship aquila product

But not my idea - Googles from Brave is something to look into, don't know entirely how it works - but it's in this direction.

Goggles

I recently made a tool to create Brave Goggles using subreddits as a signal source. I already use a netsec goggle for daily searching.

https://github.com/forcesunseen/narwhalizer

How do you prevent the gaming of blacklisting?

That’s the same question as “how do you ensure complete trust” which is, of course, not possible. That doesn’t mean that “distributed trust-based blacklisting” still isn’t better than what Google is offering today, which is nothing.

Source lists from friends-of-friends.

I found the thought of adding a "yellowlist" funny, as some people are starting to find the use of "whitelist" and "blacklist" racist.

It would be more consistent to call it greenlist, yellowlist, redlist then.

How dare you, some of my best friends identify as traffic lights.

That term has been judged problematic. The appropriate term is "person of vehicular illuminativeness".

How dare you. Some of my best friends are color blind! You insensitive clod!

lmao, feeling left out with no brown list then.

The proper terms now are allowlist and blocklist

Don’t forget to avoid saying ‘blacksmith’ too. Another somewhat ‘racist’ one. /s

Still waiting for Mastercard to change their incredibly ‘racist’ company name. /s

Some people couldn't find their butt with both hands and a map. Best not to take advice from them. Unless you find yourself surrounded. In which case smile and nod.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com