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Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

This is great. It means I won't see Reddit content popping up all over search results in other engines. Can Medium do the same? And perhaps Quora?

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FYI, Kagi lets you do this and personalize it as you desire. They even share aggregated stats※ about which domains users choose to block/lower. (Mine generally match these stats.)

※ - https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=-2

You can also do this for free with uBlackList: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

This has greatly enhanced my Google experience - easy to ban content farms, AI-generator websites from appearing in Google Images etc.

> Kagi lets you do this and personalize it as you desire.

Kagi shill here. Are they finally applying filters and operands to image searches?

Asking because it was a tough year seeing Pinterest as top filter choice and top result in images (when set as filter=block).

(edit: I just tried searching->image: beautiful quilt patterns. I didn't spot any Pinterest results!)

I have never understood why DDG, etc steadfastly refuse to obey operands in image searches. Most days. Every blue moon operands seem to work. I think.

sidebar: Yesterday I saw Yandex obey quotes in a web search. It was the 1st time I've seen that.

> Are they finally applying filters and operands to image searches?

That was a bug, apologies. It should be fixed now.

I sincerely appreciate the diligence. I really did see Pinterest results over a longish span. I may well have only noted their presence and not their absence - skewing my perspective.

Overall, my experience is very positive. I'm on many PCs throughout the day and I miss Kagi when it isn't there.

Pinterest serves pages in many domains (different TLDs). It is better to use a regex to block them.

I would if Kagi could. I blocked them all manually.

Kagi doesn't provide it natively because of performance issues. They contributed to ublacklist to add kagi search. You can use it with regex and matching rules

> If you need advanced blocking features, such as specifying rules by match patterns (e.g., ://.example.com/*) or by regular expressions (e.g., /example\.(net|org)/), the uBlacklist browser extension includes support for Kagi Search.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...

That's interesting. I'll dig it up. Thank you.

>This is great. It means I won't see Reddit content popping up all over search results in other engines.

Honestly, that makes those other engines way less valuable because for many topics, telling the engine to specifically narrow the results down to reddit comments is the only way to get a decent answer to what you're looking for. I'd definitely support blocking Quora from everything though.

What use do you get out of a search engine if not searching for reddit and other forums? The rest of the internet has become a cesspool of useless AI generated crap.

To be fair Reddit threads are more and more often getting filled with useless AI generated crap as well.

To be fair, Reddit has plenty of astroturfing, too.

Interesting. I have long found Reddit to be the an excellent source of solutions to problems. Stack Overflow usually beats it for programming specific stuff, but for everything else usually the most helpful answer comes from Reddit. It's a real person, helping another real person with a real problem.

Kagi lets you configure the search engine to deprioritize or even fully eliminate search results. They ride on the back of Google's indexing so -- if you ever change your mind -- you could bring reddit searches back.

What a weird thing to say. Reddit has for a long time been a place where real people hang out and have real conversations, unlike quora and medium.

> where real people hang out and have real conversations

I don't consider the discussions there to be "real" in any meaningful way, thanks to the extensive moderation.

From what I've seen, there typically ends up being a small handful of moderator-enforced narratives that are deemed "acceptable" for a given subreddit, and any commenters deviating from those narratives get banned, or their comments end up as "[removed]" by "[deleted]", or the comments get obscured with the "comment score below threshold" notice.

It's generally some of the most one-sided and blandest discussion around. Given that there's often no meaningful back-and-forth involving differing perspectives of any sort, I'm not even sure if it should be considered "discussion". It's more like regurgitation and repetition.

I've found the situation to be particularly bad on the Canadian locale-specific subreddits, for example, but a enough of the tech-oriented ones I've seen seem to end up like that, too.

I think Reddit lost that kind of authenticity a while ago. Advertisers know the "search:reddit.com <product>" trick, and when you look at the number of upvotes, it costs _pennies_ to get your product trending in the comments.

I don't search reddit for <product> though I search it for <highly technical issue with product> because reddit is the only place where real people discuss such issues and the solutions to them.

Its not strange to me. Every single time I've followed a Reddit link from search results, I've got a short and fairly useless conversation that doesn't help me at all. So I have never understood why people like it.

Obviously, people do see value in it, or they wouldn't keep saying so! I would happily exclude Reddit links from search results though.

Yeah, but each sub to a greater or lesser degree, has its own hivemind you'll be run out of town (or possibly even banned) for challenging. And the average member of Reddit is quite willing to spout off confidently incorrect BS and downvote people into the ground who actually know what they're talking about.

Not exactly always a reliable source of info outside uncontroversial niche topics or places like /r/AskHistorians that actually moderate. And even there I've seen the occasional humdinger.

I've got thousands of karma. Used to love it. No more.

Yeah awesome, reddit was one of the last useful results beside the spam blogs and ai generated articles.

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