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Comment by Grimburger | Hacker News Reader

> it's easy to click "block this domain"

Friendly reminder that google had this feature a decade ago then removed it. Hopefully someone in the C-Suite got a few back pats for that decision.

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

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Google's gotta make money off Pinterest somehow, based on the most blocked domains on Kagi:

https://kagi.com/stats

Pinterest is a scourge on the modern web, worse than any other.

Might these stats be biased by the demographics that use Kagi? I don't use Pinterest, and never really encounter it on a daily basis, but some of my friends really like the site. Tbf, they might use stackoverflow more, but seeing Hacker News on the top 5 doesn't seem to reflect the average web user's usage...

I wonder if it is also biased in the sense that it's only certain people who customise these things. And that it's only the most common ones. You would never see my favourite car forum listed here, but bumping it in search results is where I see value with the feature.

There was a time where Google image search was dominated by Pinterest results but clinking through never took you to the photo. And most of the photos were rehosting of the original so you wouldn't get that either.

> Might these stats be biased by the demographics that use Kagi?

yes, obviously.

but also: Selection Bias Is A Fact Of Life

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of...

Do your friends who use it use Google to use it? Or do they go to the site itself.

I don’t use the site itself but the irritating thing is a first page full of useless Pinterest links when searching for something.

I only recently discovered pinterest as a useful site, but only because a friend convinced me to create an account. It only becomes usable with an account and it even makes fun, but most people are probably like I was and don’t want to create an account and are annoyed of pinterest hijacking the „save image“ function, redirecting you when you don’t have an account and nagging you with a login wall. It really only becomes great if you give in (only took me 5 years or so).

Of course they are biased. Just look at how NYTimes is both blocked and upvoted on Kagi. Some people like a source and others don’t, it’s that simple really.

For me, I ignore NYT because I'm not a subscriber and it's annoying to always hit the paywall.

It's worth checking your library for a digital pass to the NY times and other papers.

I used pinterest and still hate(d) when it popped up on search.

Without too much conjecture I think the problem is search-related web crawlers and users have very different experiences with pinterest. To the web crawler, the information is there and easily accesible. To a user, it might be behind a login, or part of an image description, or a sidenote, or whatever. The page doesn't exactly load with what you are looking for front and center

Additionally, I don't use it through a browser, I use it in an app, so im not logged in on my browser.

It is indeed, hence “https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=%s -site:quora.com -site:pinterest.com” as my default search syntax.

I had to quit doing so, because I discovered that it didn't just exclude listed domains, but performed a totally different search. Locations or local results were largely missing, when I excluded some domains.

That's curious, please expand on this. Do you really mean it performed a search for different thing? If so - have you figured how it differed?

Or did it just have to perform a non-cached search and thus not only excluded said domains, but could also reorder the other results based on the current relevance, rather than cached relevance from the past that is being served to everyone else who doesn't exclude said domains?

When I search for “pizza hut”, I get: the info panel that shows Wikipedia intro and company social media profiles on the right, locations results and integrated map view as the second result. When I search for “pizza hut -site:pinterest.com”, I get none of those. In addition, results are listed in a different order.

PS: I'm blocking all ads.

I have a strong memory that Quora used to be quite good, and then was suddenly horrendous. Is this just me?

Not just you, it used to have solely high quality Q&A...then the yahoo answers folks migrated over

if this was the main cause, the expected result would be lots of highly-upvoted bad answers, as opposed to lots of scarcely-upvoted bad answers that somehow rank highly in Google searches

Quora used to be good but then they had to try to make revenue

Quora has plenty of potential for making consistent profit without whoring itself out, but consistent profit isn't enough in the post-Freedman world that we live in

They started monetizing it by paying people to write answers, so it's now full of blogspam.

Quora was excellent for SEO, so brands and companies started using Quora answers to pump their own products and services. It's completely useless now.

I wouldn't say that's the problem I've observed. around 2015 or so I remember consistent useful Quora answers from Quora. it was Yahoo answers but better because people could justify with qualifications. I actually had an account briefly

then I'm not exactly sure when, but definitely by 2018, every answer I ever see on Google is either incorrect, answering the wrong question, or in broken English. commonly all three at once

I don't recall ever seeing a product placement, although admittedly I stopped clicking a long time ago

my educated guess is that due to some likely seo-related concern they deleted/archived/unlisted their old good quality answers in favour of newer more seo-friendly answers

it may not even be their fault, it's possible that Google's algorithm just doesn't drag up older answers from their website, but given my experience with the decision-making in the brief time I was a user there (e.g. removing the ability to add a description to questions) I suspect not

Pinterest uses different domains for every country so you'd need to add around a dozen qualifiers to get the big ones excluded.

same here

I’d argue that Google is worse than Pinterest. We got here due to Google.

To be fair, google DID provide quality at scale in the past. I'm not sure the same can be said about Pinterest.

Due to linkrot, a lot of images that stood on independent websites, are now only available on Pinterest, which scraped and cached them before the original site went dark. Clicking through to the original links these days often leads to 404s.

It's telling that the top sites on that list accurately map to companies that have been the most "successful" at blitzing the incentive structures of the current internet economics model.

I don't understand why people hate Pinterest in image search results. If the image is relevant to my search then I don't care who's hosting it. Can somebody explain to me what the problem is here? https://0x0.st/HO57.webm

(I don't have a pinterest account, if that makes a difference.)

I don't like pinterest because the images have no metadata. If I see something I'm interested in--like a piece of furniture--I have no way of knowing how to get more info on it.

Same thing with those displays that rotate earthporn with no info on the location. So annoying to see spectacular things and not know what they are.

I was wondering what would be the impact of being in the front page of HN, it's awesome that their stats are open: almost 2k new members!

The uBlacklist browser plugin adds support for blocking sites in Google searches.

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

This looks really good, thanks. Works on other engines too. Goodbye Quora results.

will check it out, thanks!

This seems the most obvious value add feature for search results at both an individual level and for reviewing overall moderation.

I wonder what possible logic there could be to not allow it? The only one I can think of is they don't want bridgading to create a wider system block but that seems easily enough to resolve.

The easiest is to look where the money is. Might be risky to let your custo^H products hide the pages where you have most revenue generating ads.

Eventually someone was going to create an easy to list/share/subscribe list that individuals could easily add to their personal Google domain block list. Think EasyList.

At that point they would be bleeding ad revenue as all the nasty, fake, abusive, spammy websites would be insta blocked.

Imagine being able to add a list and all of a sudden half the SEO blogs are excluded from results. Assuming Google even allows it, they would then have to work even harder to find relevant content to your search query. They can't rely on throwing a huge wall of semi-relevant results that you have to wade through, generating ad impressions as you go along.

Counterpoint: That feature has very little utility to all but a tiny fraction of users. Those users can readily find other means (e.g. extensions) to achieve the same thing. In the interest of simplicity, it was the right call to remove this. I imagine it was pitched for its ability to gather feedback on search quality, but the type of people using the feature aren't representative.

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