

Ask HN: What sites, e.g. experts-exchange.com, would you remove from Google? - epi0Bauqu

In Google's results, what useless sites do you notice coming up again and again?
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skolor
Its funny you mention experts-exchange. Whenever I see that as a search
result, its usually a relief. I have yet to see an experts-exchange page that
did not have the information I was looking for on it, even though they do make
it rather difficult to find (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to
see the actual answer).

Compared to the huge number of real spam sites that usually come up when
search for technology related questions, like all of those mailing-list
archives/mirrors, and the huge number of pages that ripped old forum content,
experts-exchange is amazing.

I can't really think of any pages I would want removed. I would like to see
better pages for a lot of products, but that seems to have more to do with the
manufacturers simply not creating the pages than with Google. Search results
for physical goods seem to be fairly lacking, its always hard to find
information about them and not just stores selling them.

~~~
ErrantX
The thing with experts exchange is you have to pay to see the answers, right?
(unless I have missed something).

Because they are all over google for most error related searches it is
frustrating to click without looking and find a useless page (taunting you
almost :P). It hides all the free useful pages with the same answers on :(

I wouldnt remove it from Google though - and I agree, it is better than all
the spam link sites.

~~~
astrodust
It implies that you need to pay to see the answers even though they are
presented there on the page. The first block of "answers" is deliberately
mangled to imply you need to pay to see them, and then there is a block of
advertisements, but below that is the same answers presented in plain text.

Very shifty indeed.

------
pert
The price comparison sites that don't contain reviews but do manage to come
high up in a Google search for 'X reviews'.

------
viraptor
swik.net - For some reason I see it's "search" pages every day in search
results. Put two protocol names together, or a language + protocol and you're
almost guaranteed to get it in the second place :/

scribd - They hide your search phrases somewhere in the page, so that you can
think you've found exactly what you were looking for. But all you get is some
random, slightly related book that doesn't help you at all.

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JshWright
Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to whip up an extension (or just a
greasemonkey script) to append "-site:blah.com" entries to all google
searches, according to a user defined list.

In fact, I'd be surprised if such an extension didn't already exist (I'm not
interested enough to go look...)

~~~
devicenull
The "Customize Google" extension does this

------
prakash
1\. Sites which are useless for everyone e.g.: splogs, etc.

2\. Some sites could be useful for a few, while being completely useless for
the rest i.e. letting users remove certain sites from their results only

3\. Like the ad-block software, people could subscribe to well-defined popular
lists to get started.

4\. I would also segment by verticals. E.g.:when you do a people search, you
could bucket results into:

a.) sites where the user, him/her self has entered the info - linkedin,
facebook type websites

b.) sites where a community has created a profile - wikipedia

c.) sites that _inteliigently_ crawl other sites and present the info --
lead411 , pipl, zoominfo, spoke, etc are useless to me

------
compay
Here in Argentina, if you search in Spanish, todoar.com.ar comes up in the top
10 for almost everything. I'll hand it to the owners, they know how to do SEO.
The problem is there's no useful content on any of their ad-ridden pages.

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jacquesm
All the stores that have been spidered (amazon.com etc)

Googles own sites (youtube.com, images.google.com, etc)

All the cloaked sites (sites that will redirect you after landing, or that
show you different content than they showed the search engine)

All the spammers (you've already mentioned experts xchg, but there are many
many more)

Anything that points to or contains the word sedoparking

All the crappy blogs

I'm sure that google could do with several billion pages _less_ than they
index right now and their quality would shoot up.

~~~
JshWright
I would argue that indexing a bunch of crap actually _improves_ the quality of
Google's search.

Just like trying to filter e-mail spam, the larger your spam corpus, the
easier it is to differentiate between valid content and junk.

~~~
jacquesm
If they did a better job on the differentiation then I would agree with you.

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udfalkso
I actually wrote myself a greasemonkey script to hide results from w3schools
once upon a time. I'll try to dig it up.

Their docs are almost always missing the one piece of information I actually
want (usually a function definition) and they nearly always rank very highly
for such queries.

------
AhmadH
about.com

~~~
KWD
I actually find About.com useful at times. However, an About.com site that is
no more than a spam site is Consumer Search. Sad that such a site is owned by
the NY Times.

------
Mankhool
If Google won't filter the garbage out of the results why doesn't someone
build something that will, for example, instantly remove any webpage that
hasn't been updated since 1999 etc.etc. Off topic yes, but I find most of the
sites that come up, well, useless.

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scumola
I have my own 'custom' search engine that filters out those annoying sites.
You can use it here:
[http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015394218516616598090:kmqd...](http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015394218516616598090:kmqdbzcdieu)

------
KWD
I've often thought that if you removed any site that uses Google Adsense you'd
get much better results.

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hdx
I wish I had known the experts-exchange "hack" before...

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jusob
All my competitors :-)

~~~
kingsley_20
I would _not_ do that :-)

------
FreeRadical
mahalo

~~~
timcederman
and WikiAnswers (aka a huge number of seed questions and no answers).

------
bhseo
I have been compiling a list of useless sites to share with the world. You
will need CustomizeGoogle for Firefox or your own userscript in the browser of
your choice. Come to think of it, I might even create some userscripts/plugins
for other browsers to go with my useless website list.

If you'd like to contribute your own lists or userscripts, let me know.

~~~
bhseo
Here is an example from my list, I call this the "site info" category.

<http://*.aboutus.org/*> <http://www.quantcast.com/*>
<http://www.websiteoutlook.com/*> <http://www.xomreviews.com/*>
<http://www.statbrain.com/*> <http://www.alexa.com/data/*>
<http://searchanalytics.compete.com/*> <http://builtwith.com/?*>
<http://*.compete.com/*> <http://www.who.is/*>

