
Google: Hide sites to find more of what you want - ssclafani
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html
======
jmillikin
Just tried it out with the manual block page at <
<http://www.google.com/reviews/t> >

I notice that when I block a subdomain (eg, <http://answers.yahoo.com/> ) the
page actually shows the entire domain (yahoo.com) as blocked.

Is this just an error in the display, or does it actually only block based on
domain? If the second, this significantly limits the usability, since I can't
block < <http://someobviouslinkspam.blogspot.com> > without also blocking
every blogspot.com site.

~~~
jonursenbach
Having the same answers.yahoo.com issue here. Very weird.

Edit: Clicking on "show details" it says that answers.yahoo.com is blocked, so
maybe they're only showing the base domain here. Still weird.

~~~
jmillikin
Click "Download as text file" -- only yahoo.com is included in the download.
Based on the file contents (UNIX line endings), I'm guessing that's a raw-ish
dump of the database contents.

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ChuckMcM
Ah, good to see Google following our lead :-) (Disclaimer I work at Blekko and
we've had this feature from launch, and we don't limit you to 500 sites
either)

On a more serious note though, its nice to see Google validate our assertion,
that un-modified Google search results are getting poorer and poorer. Not that
they would actually say it directly like that of course. Now lets see if they
are willing to drop over a million crappy sites out of their index ...

~~~
ChuckMcM
FWIW, in my experience one of the more difficult aspects of starting and
growing a company is knowing if what you believe is true, or just something
you want to be true.

So you go to start a company and you say that you believe the search
experience is getting worse and worse. That you believe the leader in the
market place is fighting a losing battle of trying to algorithmically
determine relevance in a world where humans will actively work to subvert the
algorithms. That the world would be a better place if a more customizable
search experience existed.

A common response is "Well if this is such an important idea they would
already be doing it."

So as an entrepreneur you deal with the naysayers and you build something
which other people have "... been clamoring for a blacklist for years" and yet
has never materialized. And you put it out into the market.

Right up until you deliver your product, nobody knows who is 'right' in this
back and forth. It is all academic. You've built the best product you know how
to build, you offer it up to the world, and when you ship the debate stops
being academic and starts becoming empirical.

When the market leader adds features that mimic ones you've launched with
several months ago, it can be simply timing (they may have been going to do it
all along and it just happens that they did it now), it can be a response, it
can be random I suppose. Regardless of why they did it, it seems to be an
unequivocal damnation of pure algorithmic search.

As one of Blekko's founding concepts was that the search experience can be
made better by human curation, I choose to interpret it as validation. Not
that I expect Google to join in and adopt the "web search bill of rights"
anytime soon of course.

~~~
chc
I don't think it's fair to call this "an unequivocal damnation of pure
algorithmic search." The search is still purely algorithmic. This just allows
individual users to choose which results are interesting to them in
particular. A particular human's (or group of humans') curation would not be a
perfect fit for everyone either.

Similarly, I don't see the ability to choose whether you're doing an image
search or a news search as a condemnation of algorithmic search either.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Perhaps its an overstatement, but you have to recall that Google's "I'm
feeling Lucky" button was designed to be the one page they had deduced you
were looking for, their stretch goal, a results page with one link. The one
they know you're looking for.

Now they have backed off on that, with reasoning that it is really not truly
possible given that the search "Sony XBR TV" might be you are looking for the
manual for the TV or to buy the TV or something which isn't known, but the
goal is always to have the result you're looking for on the first page. That
has been their target and promise for years.

So by creating a feature, and putting it into production, to "block sites" it
suggests to me that they are saying "Hey, we know our algorithm is failing and
we have given up (perhaps temporarily) trying to fix it. We know it will put
sites you don't want to see into the first page. Here is a manual tool to weed
those out."

It seems like something of a philosophy change at least. Perhaps Matt will
chime in.

~~~
tblueski
I got to be honest. Blocking sites doesn't seem to be working that well for
you guys.

Look at this search - "how to get pregnant" - that exact phrase gets 550K
searches on google a month. My wife and I did this search last week actually.

Blekko's top 3 results are 1. get-pregnant-guide.com which is an affiliate
site that points to pregnancymiracle.com - one of those crappy ebook sites
where they have a bunch of testimonials and ask for you to pay $39.95 for
their guide, 2. a digg post that has 1 digg which points to a hubpages article
that no longer exists, 3. purelyfitness.com/how-to-get-pregnant which is also
an affiliate site that points to pregnancymiracle.com.

Google's top sites are the mayoclinic.com, mahalo.com, and
howtogetpregnant.net. The least useful to me was howtogetpregnant.net, but
they still gave a decent amount free advice. I actually found Mahalo to be the
most informative which is blocked from your results. I find Calacanis just as
annoying as everyone else, but this page was more beneficial to me than even
the mayoclinic.

~~~
ChuckMcM
You are right, those results suck. However when you type 'how to get pregnant
/health' those results seem to be pretty good.

~~~
greglindahl
The suggested slashtag for [how to get pregnant] is /pregnancy ... those
results are pretty nice, albeit less medically-focused than the /health
results.

------
sjs382
Wow. Can't believe how quickly this was added to Google Search, rather than it
remaining a Chrome Extension for a long time. Glad to see it, though!

~~~
cryptoz
I think one of Google's "secret" weapons is their incredibly fast innovation
and time-to-market. Their rivals spend years building a product in secret
(e.g., Windows) and then release a giant binary blob to the world whether the
world wants it or not. Google's fast-paced changes to their core product are a
huge part of what keeps them on top.

~~~
oldstrangers
One of the advantages ex-googlers cite as a reason for joining facebook is
that facebook is much faster at deploying new things. Google has been
nortiously slow with most things. As per the windows comparison, Microsoft
releases updates for their windows products almost daily so I dont see much
difference.

~~~
cryptoz
> Microsoft releases updates for their windows products almost daily so I dont
> see much difference.

Sure, but these are minor updates. Look at the major updates. Windows Vista
was developed for about 5 years in secret, and when it was eventually released
to the world it was a disaster. To keep with the OS comparison, Google has
been releasing _major_ OS upgrades every 6 months - 1 year. Android is moving
so much faster than Windows or even WP7 and is a huge part of why it's
successful. In the time that WP7 has been out (five months? ish?) there have
been 0 updates to most phones; maybe a few phones got the small update-to-the-
updater. With that same period of time Google has announced and released a new
Android version.

~~~
oldstrangers
Yes, but you compared google adding a new link to their search results to
Microsoft releasing new versions of windows. That comparison doesnt make
sense; however, the small updates Microsoft makes daily is a valid comparison.
You're off on a different argument now, regardless.

~~~
cryptoz
I was trying to generalize a bit with their strategies rather than make
specific one-to-one comparisons. When Google rolls out a search results page
change, potentially hundreds of millions of people see the effect immediately.
When Microsoft pushes updates to Windows, there is rarely new functionality
added and few people actually notice day to day. Most definitely not all
Windows installations get the updates _daily_ (whatever happened to Patch
Tuesday? Does MS actually push out daily updates to their customers? I'd be
very impressed if this is true).

Anyway, all I was really trying to say is that Google is, in general, faster
to react to market changes, faster to push updates, and faster in developing
new features when compared to Microsoft. And that's one of their advantages.
Sorry if my specific examples became the primary discussion here, I really
only meant the Windows comparison to be an example showing a larger strategy.

~~~
kenjackson
But Bing does new features at a pace on par, if not faster, than Google
search.

It might be the case that different types of products have different release
cycles. Not strictly though... IE is way slower than Chrome to rev.

~~~
chc
I've always had the impression that's because the IE team is kind of paralyzed
by a fear of breaking the Web.

------
nswanberg
It would be interesting to see the percentage of Google users that that block
even one site. Though even if it's a small percentage it could help the
blockers take out their search frustrations by blocking a site, and help the
non-blockers by giving Google hints as to what searchers don't like.

The magical optimization I would prefer would be a non-commercial search. If I
search for a piece of gear sometimes I don't want to buy it and instead want
to weigh buying it or just look up reference information. For some searches
that is tough, and permanently blocking commercial sites isn't an option.
(I've occassionally resorted to limiting my searches to .edu and .org domains
with limited success). Even temporarily blocking commercial sites might not
help, though, since sites like Amazon.com have fantastic reviews on some
items.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
"by giving Google hints as to what searchers don't like."

Crowd-sourced curation -- this must be Google's eventual goal for the
"blocking" feature. Can't content farms be thought of as spam? And, if so,
don't the same techniques for spam identification apply, especially the "mark
as spam" button in Gmail?

[Conjecture and speculation below as there's no evidence Google is going to
modify search results based on users' blocking propensities, but I think the
possibilities are worthy of consideration.]

I wonder how this scheme could be gamed? Consider how one might game spam
filters to cause a target's future mailings to end up marked as spam. To hit a
high-volume target, one would have to cause a ton of email addresses under his
control to be placed on the senders distribution list. Then, when messages
arrived, he would mark them all as spam. Although the total percentage of the
sender's mailing list comprised of the bad guy's email addresses might be
small, this technique would still be effective because the percentage of
"activist" recipients required to flag any sender as a spammer is so low (at
least I'm told). To address this problem, Google could certainly apply schemes
similar to those used to identify click fraud. Such countermeasures would
require the bad guy to make his attack appear more organic. Have there been
actual instances of such denial-of-service attacks?

With a similar strategy, could, say, an anti-abortion group enlist its
membership to banish pro-abortion groups' websites from search results? What
if members were instructed to search for phrases like "How to get an abortion"
and block Planned Parenthood, etc.? The difference between websites and email
lists is that the owner of an email list has direct control and could take
countermeasures like changing mail servers, etc. Also, large bulk mailers
(MailChimp, etc.) generally have good relationships with large email box
providers like Google and can therefore plead their clients' cases directly to
a responsible person. How would pro-abortion groups get attention from Google
if their site rankings dropped due to such grassroots organizing? Would Google
be able to identify this as an orchestrated effort?

How would the behavioral patterns of pro/anti-abortion activists be any
different than this forum's treatment of Experts Exchange? Google will observe
that one small segment of its userbase blocks the site in high numbers but
another segment, when searching for the same terms (MySQL failure XYZ) click
on Experts Exchange results? Wouldn't users actually seeking information on
how to get an abortion recognize the name "Planned Parenthood" and click on
those same results which were blocked by activists?

~~~
ollysb
Perhaps the solution would be personalised weightings for search results. You
could then build a weighting graph based on blacklists, e.g. if I have a pro-
abortion site on my list and it's found on someone else's blacklist then I
would have a negative weight for the other sites on their blacklist.
Maintaining the graph and weightings would be massively expensive though so
I'm not sure when it would be viable.

------
gwern
For me, this is frustrating because it's not that useful in general search
results, but it would be extremely useful in pruning Custom Search Engine
results - and that's exactly where it isn't.

I want a one-click way to ban a domain from search engine results because most
blacklisted domains in my Wikipedia search engine
([http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=009114923999563836576:1eor...](http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=009114923999563836576:1eorkzz2gp4))
are porn or filesharing sites. One recognizes such spam in an instant, but it
still takes a while to prune down the URL to the right domain, flip to the
edit tab, paste it in, flip back, and relocate myself.

I'm not kidding when I say such a one-click button would cut by at least half
the time I have to put into cleaning up the CSE results for any given query.

------
AlexC04
As an experiment, I thought I'd block FoxNews from my results to see if it
would stop coming up in my "google news" aggregator.

Sadly, it does not. Would have been neat though.

~~~
cpeterso
Google News' Settings allows you to configure "more news from" and "less news
from" by publisher.

More news from:

    
    
      NPR
      The Economist
      Wired News
    

Less news from:

    
    
      FOXNews		
      FOXSports.com		
      Wall Street Journal
    

<http://news.google.com/news/settings>

------
mitjak
Quick, block expertsexchange!

~~~
mrleinad
Regardless of how insanely irritating their site is, I've found my answer
there.. about once or twice. But I wouldn't block them entirely..

~~~
nswanberg
Perhaps Google could introduce an "I'm Feeling Desperate" button for the times
you just _know_ your result lies within one of your previously blocked sites.

~~~
Peaker
You could log out..

------
bcrescimanno
Aside from the "big two" (experts exchange and Mahalo) I actually think the
one I'll block first is Wikipedia. Truthfully, I really like Wikipedia as a
resource and love to peruse the information there--but if I want the article
from Wikipedia, I'll go to Wikipedia and look it up. If I'm searching google,
it's probably for something that's not going to be covered well by Wikipedia
anyway.

For example, let's say someone has suggested to me to use the factory pattern
to solve a problem in a project and I'm not intimately familiar with that
pattern. I search for "Factory design pattern" on Google and notice that the
first 2 results are wikipedia results. There's some good, basic boiler plate--
but that's not what I need (Ok, what I really _need_ is probably a trusty copy
of the "Gang of Four" so maybe it's a bad--or at least contrived example).

~~~
mikexstudios
I disagree. Having wikipedia results at the top of my google searches has been
extremely useful. It's easier to find a wikipedia page through google rather
than search on the wikipedia site.

~~~
bcrescimanno
That's a fair point; though I generally use Google for, "I want something
better than the encyclopedia treatment" on a topic.

------
taylorbuley
Anyone have a list of "bigresource" like sources of bad programming tips? I
have been using site:stackoverflow.com but would prefer just to block sites
like this: [http://mysql.bigresource.com/Fatal-error-Can-t-open-
privileg...](http://mysql.bigresource.com/Fatal-error-Can-t-open-privilege-
tables-Table-mysql-host-doesn-t-exist-JWCFO5og.html)

------
al_james
Excellent. Thanks Google, you have just saved my sanity.

So can I disable the chrome plugin now? Will it remember the sites I have
already blocked?

~~~
EricBurnett
Check the block list on <http://www.google.com/reviews/t> . If it lists the
pages you blocked through the extension, you'll be good to go. Otherwise you
can always add them manually.

~~~
al_james
Good call. No, you have to start again. Oh well, not a big deal.

Note you can only block 500 sites, I should think thats enough though.

------
pedrokost
Many people already know what sites they don't want, and never open these
links. But to block those links, do users really have to open a link and
return to Google to block it?

Also, the sites that have already been blocked with the extension, will they
be auto-blocked?

~~~
ejdyksen
You could also just go here and add manually to your heart's content:

<http://www.google.com/reviews/t>

------
paolomaffei
Now I'd only wish people to be able to share lists with friends, just like you
download blocking lists from adblock :)

But in the meanwhile good riddance Mahalo, eHow, Yahoo Answers and
ExpertSExchange, etc

------
cake
I wonder why Google prefers that you block a whole domain instead of a result
(what searchwiki did).

As said in another comment I wouldn't be confortable to block the whole
expertsexchange.com domain, I get revelant results sometimes, yet some of the
results of the same website are so unhelpful I'm sure I don't want to see them
again (auto approved solutions and stuff like that).

It also happens when I search for something I already searched for a while
back. Some of the results remain irrevelant, but not necessarily the whole
domain.

~~~
danilocampos
Because there are a raft of bad actors out there with junk sites. Removing
them utterly from your personal existence can help make search much more
useful. Examples:

\- Yahoo! Answers

\- Ezine Articles

\- Those Efreedom assholes

\- Experts Exchange (your experience aside, this place is crap for most
everyone else)

\- All the junk sites around appliance manuals

\- All the other content farms

------
pbiggar
Hopefully this will get combined with Google Alerts, so I have a one-click way
to tell google that people are creating spam on topics I care about.

------
erik_p
This seems like a great idea to block the really bad offenders, but doesn't
seem granular enough for the sites that have inconsistent quality of content
(i.e. a user generated content site can have both shallow/crappy content AND
useful content under the same domain).

I wish we could give more contextual feedback, like... THIS link was
helpful/relevant, THIS link was not.

~~~
stanleydrew
It's not intended for use on sites with inconsistent quality. PageRank takes
care of the individual pages on those sites.

~~~
erik_p
How can that intent of purpose be conveyed to the user when they are
blacklisting whole sites?

They aren't using these blacklisting as a signal for influencing the google
algo, YET... but it seems inevitable.

I'm just trying to say it seems a little too much like an axe instead of a
scalpel.

Personally I can't wait to start rage blocking domains that have pop over
modals for surveys / advertising, or have sound enabled by default.

~~~
stanleydrew
That's a fair question. Since they aren't using user blacklists as a signal
yet I will punt. Were they to start, then I think you have a point that finer-
grained data is preferred. They should probably offer both options in that
case, i.e. "don't show this result anymore" and "don't show any results from
bar.example.com anymore."

------
eykanal
Maybe it's just me, but I switched to Bing a few weeks ago, and I'm finding a
pretty good increase in search result quality. For me, good search by default
> good search only with my help.

OTOH, I imagine that bing will also eventually succumb to content farms and
other techniques that will come up, so maybe this is the way of the future.

------
Tycho
If the spammers and content-farms were the Empire, this would be like blowing
up the Death Star. Brilliant.

------
TGJ
That's awesome. I'm glad they are giving the users more options. I searched
for how to bake a cake to finally block ehow from my results. How good that
feels. Trash sites are about to feel the sting I imagine. That reminds me,
need to block about.com too.

------
afhof
What happens if you block Google?

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Time-space breaks down. Don't do it!

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if in a few months users are
mysteriously going to have facebook.com added to their block list.

~~~
mitjak
That'll just block Facebook from showing up in Google results which they never
did in the first place unless you searched for someone's name.

------
geuis
Not sure why they are limiting this to particular browser versions. If I'm
running IE7 (which I'm not), what does that have to do with which sites I want
to block?

~~~
tonfa
Maybe the way they detect you went back to the search result depends on the
modern browser functionality.

------
shimonamit
Now, if they could only provide a way to disable previews...

~~~
thezilch
Click the magnifying glass on any search-return item.

------
gxs
You know, maybe I'm just slow and don't see the big picture, but I don't
understand what all the hubub is about.

The '-' operator has worked wonders for me for years.

~~~
rglullis
Do you type "-mahalo.com -efreedom.net -allthespamblogsthatannoyme.com", every
time you do a search?

------
dserodio
I don't see this button on google.com.br

I hope it's propagated to international Google pages soon.

------
Limes102
I have been waiting for this so I can hide Experts Exchange.

------
bretthellman
What's next? Build your own search results

