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Comment by mmcgaha | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am wrong about this, and maybe the SEO junk sites would find a way to evolve, but what I really want from google is a plonk button so I can have a personal kill file for sites that I never want to see again.

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Google used to support this[0], and I used it happily for blocking low-quality domains such as Experts Exchange, certain Wikia subdomains, and Pintrest. The feature was later removed[1] in favor of a browser extension, but the extension was less functional because it could only filter out results from the current page, so heavily-spammed keywords had result pages with only one or two links.

Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...

[1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-more-personalized-resul...

You could use ublacklist[1], it does filtering of search results on the client side. arosh’s list is a good place to start blocking crap.

[1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

[2] https://github.com/arosh?tab=repositories

Google allowing the blacklisting of sites with lots of ads on them and using google analytics?

They have enough information when yiu clock back and select a different result. And this hasnt killed SEO spam.

That's because Google is an ad company. They will never be part of the solution.

It would be possible to do that at browser level through extensions, for example there is one to filter out Pinterest results from search results. I wouldn't however expect that potentially great feature to be natively available in Google search anytime soon, unless they made it as a analytics filled paid service and in a way that gave their advertisers and investors the power of circumventing it, that is, both plonk and unplonk as a service.

HN perennial hit Kagi is good for this.

Wow, yes to this -- your own google blacklist.

As a bonus, Google would have access to the list of who had blacklisted what sites -- surely that would be useful to them as a signal to detect "SEO spam sites".

But if they do that, then Goodharts gonna get his law involved and SEO will then involve gaming these lists to blacklist competitors. Arg.

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