
 Blocked Sites is discontinued - radley
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1210386
======
bittermang
Not surprising, as the feature hasn't worked for quite some time, despite
still being available to configure within your settings. I am disappointed
however, because there are quite a few sites on the Internet that I would much
rather not see at all, ever again. They are the noise in my search for signal
in my Google search results. And the entire point of switching to Google way
back in the day was the quality of their search results versus what was
available in the late 90s.

Being able to personally fine tune those results myself, outside of what a
robot thought to "personally" customize my experience to, was a great feature.
Suggesting I use a third party plugin for a browser I don't use is hardly a
compromise or a solution, and does nothing for my Google search results on
mobile platforms where that plugin is not now nor will likely ever be
available.

~~~
Shank
Personal Blacklist is an official Google extension, it just doesn't sync with
anything or save to a database. At least for my purposes, I don't need it
anywhere but my desktop machine to help out in result pruning (experts
exchange, fixya).

Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me of
its shutdown.

~~~
zorlem
_> Their offered download link doesn't even work for me, it just notifies me
of its shutdown._

After you go to that link and read the notification, there is another link to
download the blocklist as a plain-text file. Mine contained a number of
domains I've added during the years.

It's quite interesting to see all the domains I've blocked so far :)

~~~
elmofromok
Mine was surprisingly short..

www.w3schools.com

~~~
hackerboos
Well I had all those sites that scrape StackOverflow added to my list.

I love that SO uses a CC license but it does have some unintended
consequences.

~~~
vwinsyee
Is there a public list of such site? I think I'd find it quite useful (for my
own blocking).

~~~
hackerboos
I don't think there is. I did it on a case-by-case basis.

------
monkeyfacebag
I guess I need to go back to manually appending "mdn" to all my html/css/js-
related queries. How much longer is w3schools going to stay at the top of
those results?

EDIT: Actually, it turns out I've been using the linked Chrome extension (went
to install, discovered it was already installed). I just conflated the two
services and forgot about the extension. So to make this productive, I
recommend this extension. I haven't seen w3schools in months.

~~~
gee_totes
_/me straightens DuckDuckGo independent evangelist hat and nervously rings
doorbell_

"Judging from your comment, you sound like the perfect user for Duck Duck Go!

If you set DDG as the default browser for chrome/ff, you can search mdn with
just '!mdn foo'. Also at your fingertips is searching !jquery (and hundreds of
other search shortcuts)

DuckDuckGo is great and makes searching super productive!"

 _/me smiles eagerly_

~~~
esbwhat
Can I ask you why you see DDG as the perfect alternative to google? One would
think that if you are concerned with the sort of things google is doing, you
would bank on an open source search engine, so this sort of thing doesn't just
repeat itself.

~~~
LukeShu
I have both YaCy and Seeks (distributed open source search engines) in my FF
search bar, but the results are really... disappointing. I just get good
results with DDG.

DDG's commitment to privacy and not bubbling, etc. I do not believe are going
away, it's their biggest selling point.

Besides, as long as RMS is demanding that DDG be the default search engine in
the GNU web browser, it's good enough for me.

------
brokentone
This really sucks for me because it means I'll have to see experts-exchange
results again.

Why is Google shutting every secondary project/feature down right now? Reader,
labs, blocked sites, code search... Any engineers able to weigh in on how this
is affecting innovation or the 80/20 policy?

~~~
deelowe
Experts exchange stopped showing up in the results back when Google released
the new indexing engine over a year ago. You should be fine.

~~~
eknkc
I still see it sometimes. Meanwhile, Quora is in the works to become next
EE...

~~~
polynomial
I don't understand this comment. Quora doesn't show up in results bc they're
not in the index, it's a private site. Unless that's changed?

~~~
calebegg
They seem to be showing up for me. I don't have any recent organic examples,
but here's query for one of the most popular threads, and the quora thread is
the first result:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+hab...](https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+get+over+my+bad+habit+of+procrastinating)

What do you mean by "private site"?

The other objectionable/EE-like thing about it is how it hides the answers
unless you log in. That really sucks.

~~~
pyre
EE never hid their answers. They were only obfuscated. First[1] they made it
look like the page ended, but you could scroll further and get the answers.
Later, I saw that they had a section that looks like the answers, but all of
the text was blurred. Again, if you scrolled past the 'end of the site' you
could still get to the answers.

Looks like Quora gives you the question, and the first answer, but all other
answers are Private-Only.

[1] I think that in the beginning they may have _really_ hidden their answers,
but were forced to actually show them by Google.

~~~
codezero
If you add ?share=1 to the end of a Quora URL you can get the full content.

------
Encosia
> To block particular sites from your search results, we recommend the
> Personal Blocklist Chrome extension from Google.

Because, you know, everyone using Google also uses Chrome and only uses it on
one device.

~~~
Spone
Does someone know of a Firefox extension achieving the same result?

EDIT: just found this Greasemonkey script
<https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156>

------
ChuckMcM
I find both its birth and death interesting. The birth because the fact that
you could mark sites as spam was one of the early talking points at Blekko,
the back end architecture of our engine includes a 'selector' mechanism
(slashtags) and maintaining a personal 'spam' slash tag came along for free.
Its one of the features I continue to use.

And then it showed up as a feature in Google's results which I found
interesting because having worked at Google and had the 'deeper than non-
Googlers, not as deep as someone in the search group' classes on how the two
services that made up Google search at the time, I had a feel for how much
lubricant it would take to squeeze that feature into the existing pipeline. It
made me wonder if Google was following _us_ :-)

The death of it is also interesting, because having it in the browser as a
plug-in vs the results means two things; You can't offer it as a service to
your partners, and you can't know apriori if you're sending junk. If Blekko's
partners say "We'd like to use your index but we don't want any results that
include x,y or z" we can do that but that is at the API level with results
coming right out of the index filtered by a 'negative' slashtag, but its
unclear if anyone can (or does) use Google's index in that way (unlike BOSS
for example). On the browser side, since you don't know what the plug-in is
going to kill, how do you select the 10 documents to send? It makes me wonder
that if you're doing a search in a highly contested search (like 'weight
loss') and Google can't know that the 10 blue links it is about to send you
are all spam (and on really contested keywords this is not uncommon) are you
left with just sponsored links and no organic results?

'Panda' update all you want, even Google now admits they are adding staff to
curate results (Microsoft/Bing had already gone public with their 'editor's
choice' announcement). This is a good thing, but it only covers half the
situation. At Blekko we got flamed by a user for not having any 'alternative'
medicine sites in our 'health' slashtag, which started a conversation with
that user about creating their own slashtag with all of those web sites that
were unfairly penalized by the medical establishment just because their
methods and claims weren't the product of some 'big pharma' company. But they
could (and I believe they did) create a slashtag of all those 'hidden' sites
and they got great search results for them. Reinforcing to me and others that
'spam' can be relative, and really it has two sides, user and index.

So pondering this move on Google's part makes for interesting reading.

~~~
Shank
I think it'd be illogical for Google _not_ to in some ways compete with
alternatives, like Blekko in this case. Google's core business is search, and
in the early days, it was this very naive behavior that allowed Google to
sneak right under places like Inktomi. Just because a search engine starts
small doesn't mean it can't gain traction or market, and if it has compelling
enough features, it'll happen in a heartbeat.

I suggest reading "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglass Edwards - the early chapters
describe a lot of Google's anxiety of being killed by other search engines for
one reason or another. It helps to explain why they'd be quick to adopt new
strategies to keep results fresh.

~~~
incongruity
I'm not sure google is even clear about what its core business is, these days.
It really seems quite clear that they've abandoned much of the approach and
focus on being _the information_ finder to now being the social-network
wannabe.

It's as if something flipped 180 degrees - they went from being the company
that wanted to help _you_ find out about everything to being the company that
wanted to find everything _about_ you.

~~~
jacquesm
Google's core business is advertising.

~~~
jacques_chester
Anyone who disagrees with this other Jacques is invited to take a squiz at
Google's annual reports.

Any of them since the introduction of adwords and adsense. It doesn't matter
which. They all basically read the same.

~~~
incongruity
Indeed – perhaps I was wrong to say that they don't currently know what
business they're in – rather, they _haven't_ known and recently, they've re-
aligned around a singular strategy focused on that.

The problem is that for so long, they built their public facing brand on a
completely different premise and image. Therefore, as they've re-aligned,
they're facing a bit of cognitive dissonance in the minds of their products
(err, the public).

------
chacha102
This feature has been discontinued for a few months now. I'm surprised nobody
posted this until now.

I actually have found the plugin to be mostly adequate. There aren't a ton of
sites that I feel deserve to be blocked from my search results, so syncing
isn't a gigantic problem. I do find it annoying that there is a link added to
each and every search result to block the site, but it might be useful if I
decided to be really picky about my results.

~~~
itafroma
I thought it was discontinued a while ago as well, but it was still in limbo
as of late January of this year[1].

[1]: [http://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-
feature-14640...](http://searchengineland.com/google-block-sites-
feature-146409)

------
jonknee
Back when the Chrome plug-in shipped (it preceded Blocked Sites by a bit) I
compiled an extensive list of content farms as a starting guide for people
wanting less spam in their SERPs. If you're migrating over to the extension
it's worth a look (and as always, any new suggestions for the list):

[http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-
farm...](http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farms/)

------
ianstormtaylor
This sucks because the Chrome extension has a noticeable lag before the
results are removed. I often accidentally click on a W3Schools link before the
extension kicks in, and then wonder why it even came up in results at all.

------
ebbv
Removing a feature that fixes a major shortcoming of your product (spam sites)
and directing your customers to use an extension to fix it is awful.

What faith I once had in Google being a company that puts users first is long
gone.

~~~
skylan_q
Google has been shutting down features left, right and centre. I'm left
wondering: what useful thing has google done since gmail and ads?

~~~
icebraining
From the top of my head: V8, Golang, AngularJS, Closure Tools, Search by
Image¹, Maps + Street View, Android, Now, Goggles, Fiber², Public DNS, GWT.

¹ not original, but works better than Tineye, in my opinion

² granted, only for a limited number of people

~~~
dannyr
I'm sorry. You can combine all of them and they are still not as useful Google
Reader & Blocked Sites. #sarcasm.

------
hackernewbie
For god's sake. I literally just started using it for W3Schools about two
months ago. It costs google practically nothing to do that, and now they
suggest adding another extension to chew out yet more of my memory.

Plus it looks like they aren't going to adhere to the implications of having a
number of users blocking a site. _cough_ w3schools.

~~~
darkstalker
I just noticed w3schools appearing again in my search results.. well this is
the cause.

------
Matt_Cutts
Note that you can continue to use the Chrome extension to block sites, which I
believe we rolled out before this feature. Get it at
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-
blocklist...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-
goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef)

And here's the blog post we did about the Chrome extension:
[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-
extension-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-
block-sites-from.html)

~~~
emilv
Interestingly enough this means you have to install software on your own
computer to get better search results from a company that tries to deliver a
hosted ("cloud") service. Seems backwards to me.

~~~
anigbrowl
Well, I'm with Matt on this one. When blocklist rolled out people were
stressing about having their blocked selections stored in the cloud, blocking
rings to kill competing sites and so on. I think it makes sense to build that
functionality in at the client end.

------
robryan
I don't understand why this was discontinued. Surely this data would be a gold
mine in improving the quality of search results, which is core to what Google
does.

~~~
lazugod
A blacklist that can be added to anonymously and unaccountably is not
something you want affecting search results.

~~~
robryan
Sure it is, obviously you don't take any small amount of blocks as a signal.
By getting a significant amount though and looking at each persons block list
to normalize there blocks I think it would be useful.

~~~
badgar
> Sure it is, obviously you don't take any small amount of blocks as a signal.

You do realize spammers are extremely good generating large amounts of things,
right?

> By getting a significant amount though and looking at each persons block
> list to normalize there blocks I think it would be useful.

Spammers are also very good (though not great) at adding innocuous data
alongside their spam to look like real users.

You don't realize it, but your solution has just exploded in complexity.

~~~
robryan
The same thing is true of backlinks. Sure there is a point in which it may not
be worth the trouble, not questioning that.

------
richardv
This feature didn't work at the best of times, and became so unreliable...

I also don't believe that the blocked sites was linked to my Google account,
because I had blocked sooo many different pages on W3Schools that I just
abandoned using the blocked sites feature altogether.

------
just2n
I understand this from a technical perspective, but I always thought this
feature had the potential to allow Google to gather better qualitative metrics
about websites. For instance, if a huge chunk of people who are searching for
web-related questions (end up on SO or MDN or something) and they all have
ExpertSexChange and w3schools blocked, then perhaps those should be considered
qualitatively worse and would therefore be ranked lower than the alternatives?

I guess not. I'm curious how they're determining quality in that case. Hey
Bing, maybe you could pick this up and deliver quality results over faster
results?

~~~
notatoad
i'm sure that was the original intention, and the reason for the
discontinuation is that nobody used it and the cost of maintaining the feature
exceeded the value of the data they gathered from it. (or else everybody
blocked the same few things in the first couple weeks the feature was
available, and then they stopped learning anything from the feature)

~~~
just2n
Perhaps, but when useful features see lack of use, it's usually because it's a
prohibitively difficult feature to use or very poorly presented.

Maybe if it was as simple as clicking a "never see results from this website
again" it would've seen orders of magnitude more use and been far more useful.
Perhaps an upvote/downvote system? Seems like these are relatively tiny time
investments by a couple of engineers and would serve to massively increase the
quality of results. Not sure why throwing useful features away is a better
decision.

------
firebrand39
A very good thing is the minus sign in google search. It allows you to exclude
keywords and sites. They should expand that. My searchbar gets very crowded at
times.

------
bane
I'm curious how all this "wood putting" is affecting staff attrition/layoffs.

If had invested my work into one of the major cut projects, I'd be fuming as
an employee right now.

Also, it's interesting how many of the cut services seem to be around working,
but slowly decaying and abandoned projects. It says something about google's
ability to keep working on and developing products...especially since most of
their products are essentially public betas.

------
cabirum
I wonder when will Google discontinue Gmail and offer to download all mail in
a file.

------
alainbryden
I don't remember using this feature much, but when I downloaded my block list
this is what I found:

    
    
      www.teachexcel.com
      craftkeys.com
      softwaretopic.informer.com
      www.telerik.com
      eggheadcafe.com
      www.kaboodle.com
      bigresource.com
    

Damn those aggregator sites are annoying.

~~~
pgrote
Why Telerik?

~~~
rocky1138
Every time I've gone there for ASP.NET advice it starts talking about Telerik
controls, not the basic controls found in .NET.

------
nonamegiven
So they'll tailor search results for you personally based on what they think
you'll want (or, eventually on what they want you to want), but they won't let
you declare what you don't want?

------
infoman
Personal Blocklist(by me) <http://crossrider.com/download/29789> > here an
extension that works with firefox and google chrome (and maybe with some
version of ie) > currently only block w3schools and expert-exchange :-) > will
be extendable soon

it is not on the browser marktplaces right now, so you kind of got to install
it manually.

------
taxonomyman
You can remove up to the top ones million sites with MillionShort:
<http://millionshort.com/about.html> and you can specify individual sites to
remove via settings: <http://millionshort.com/settings.php>

------
rodrigoavie
This really sucks. As said above, it wasn't working anyway. Too bad it
happened. I wonder if Google could've gained more knowledge about the common
"undesired" results and use it to improve the search.

------
greyman
Was that feature really that indispensable? I can usually get away by refining
my search query, and more often that not, using the minus sign solves the
problem.

------
factorialboy
Makes sense to me.

I'd rather have my browser know what results I don't want, than Google.

However it is Google that provides me a browser (for free) bundled with a sync
feature.

Anyway, goodbye W3Schools! :)

------
neya
Why is this even news? This was announced long time ago and I thought it was
fairly evident. Use personal blocklist, instead.

------
jmomo
I came for the horror comments about experts-exchange.com and was not
disappointed. At least two of you have mentioned it!

------
defrndr
No solutions for people not using Chrome?

~~~
johnpowell
I found this greasemonkey script and it seems to do the trick.

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95205>

------
mathnode
I know it fucking is! Which is why I am seeing Experts Exchange (a tall
claim), ahead of Stackoverflow!

------
Daiz
As many others, I used this mainly to block w3schools from my searches.
Disappointing to see it go.

------
ScottWhigham
What disturbs me is how it's okay for Google to allow this "for Chrome users
only" but it's a $700m fine for Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer into
the OS. Is Microsoft really more of a monopoly than Google? Of course not.
It's ridiculous that MSFT gets fined such high amounts but no one questions
Google's ethics or says, "Hey, wait a minute..."

~~~
icebraining
Comparisons to Microsoft aside, it's not true that no one questions Google.
The EU antitrust authorities have been examining them for two years now, they
just haven't reached a conclusion yet:
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/22/eu-google-
idUSL6N0...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/22/eu-google-
idUSL6N0BM4JI20130222)

~~~
ScottWhigham
Sorry - I misspoke. I meant "no one questions Google in this thread".

------
NicoSchweinzer
I wonder how long it takes till someone comes up with "Blockedsitesly" ^^

------
bitdestroyer
My blocked sites list only had one entry: experts-exchange.com

