I am currently self-hosting a meta search engine instance (searxng), which allows me combine searches from different engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), but also to filter out websites that I don’t want to show up.
The only website to make my blacklist so far is slant.co (useless SEO-riddled site that always comes up when I search for software comparisons). I also automatically redirect all reddit.com links to old.reddit.com.
I’m looking to expand this list. So, which websites do you blacklist? Either using software, or just mentally.
Pinterest. Fuck pinterest.
I’d add Quora to that list of fuck you websites
They added Quora+ subscription service now, you have to pay to see the actually correct answers. Free only gets you wrong answers.
The worst, hey we noticed you got a really hard to solve problem, well we got the answer right here, but we’re gonna dim it till you make an account, oh sorry that’s not really the answer thanks for the account sucker!
I made the mistake of making an account one time. Unsubscribing from all the shit they email is an unbelievably annoying task.
It’s the worst. There’s even a browser extension to blacklist them: unpinterested.
I had to get that because I got so tired of having to put minus pinterest in all my image searches.
I don’t explicitly block any, but I usually avoid clicking on pinterest and quora links. From experience, I never get what I’m looking for even without the annoying user interface.
What do people not like about Pinterest? I’ve actually found them very useful for finding pictures of my niche subjects
You cannot just open the image. You must log in to even see most images. Even working around this its scaled to tiny resolution. All content stolen/copied with zero credit/source but their seo outcompetes the original sources.
I mean sometimes Pinterest has images and if you use inspect element you can bypass all that shit
On mobile I 100% block Pinterest
Most of the time its still very low res when i did that.
It’s tough because I almost feel like I need a whitelist at this point. 90% of the first page of Google results usually read like AI-generated fluff that doesn’t actually even answer my question. There are a handful of websites I trust now to give me real information and not just clickbait SEO nonsense.
I’m at the point where I add “reddit” to the end of every search just to try and find something that was written by a real person. Maybe someday I can start adding “lemmy” instead.
Seriously, 10 years ago, the best way to find any info on a video game was to go on gamefaqs, ign guides, the steam community or a dedicated wiki.
Nowadays, it objectively still is the exact same, but google will give results for NONE OF THEM unless if you specify. There’s a truckload of those SEO garbage.
Imdb is the same if you search for a series or movie. Unless I add it to the search it’s not on the first page
Yeah it wouldn’t bother me so much if any of it was actually useful, but they all just read like a lazy student padding out the page count on a college paper
I searched for a comparison between two USB flash drive brands and the top result waffled for multiple paragraphs about the history and definition of “flash memory” before finally recommending: “just get whichever one has the best performance in your price range”. Gee, thanks AI.
Yep, I do this too. Reddit became my defacto search engine for anything gone wrong in my life almost because… Its a forvm…
Pinterest.
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Glad to see Quora as a common blocked site.
It’s fascinating seeing a answer about physics being the highest rated by a guy who “loves cheeses” with a degree in “Deez Nuts”
But where else can I pretend to be the CEO of Ford, Chief of Staff for the Obama Administration, President of ACLU, and King of the European Union?
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You could try running for US Representative in NY’s third district?
This website is so bad… it wants to make an account so badly lol
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That’s awesome. Although from what i’ve heard and seen the answers aren’t all too great.
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Hey, I wouldn’t have passed first year calculus without the help of a physics forums user named DickHandy
codegrepper.com and all its shitty clones.
All they do is scrape websites like stack overflow and github issues and present them in a more shitty way, and they somehow manage to get ranked pretty high.
https://www.grepper.com/images/reviews/review2.png “Review” on their own page. So obviously fake (alignment is off and it doesn’t follow fonts?) Plus, they misspelled their own name. This has got to be a joke
Edit: It may not be fake but i hate this website so i’d like to imagine it is
Here are a few examples: https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results
Never had heard of this site. I just kept skipping over but thus makes it so easy that I’m getting onboard!
This is great!
Oh nice!
Those ublock lists are interesting. Will definitely be stealing them for my searxng config.
Thanks!
I’ve been using a Firefox extension instead that has fairly good filters by default, because I kept getting crap results when looking at technical questions (ie. landing on over-simplified examples without details instead of official documentation).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
They publish some subscription lists of things blocked that you can chose from: splogs of GitHub/Stack overflow, Pinterest… And then you can add custom blocks directly from your results list (Quora…). It can be a nice point to start with to use their filter even out of the extension imo.
I never bothered actually creating blacklists for my browser. Mentally though, those weird websites that only rehost stack overflow replies.
The kagi search engine allows you block sites, they have a leader board of what the tops ones are here: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard pintrest is getting a fucking.
Aww, alternativeto.net isn’t that bad…
It is in my book. It’s awful
It frequently compares things like apples vs oranges. And the comparison is just wrong. A real example is comparing a photo editing app vs a photo album app. Or something ridiculous like MySQL vs CSS.
If you take it for what it is, a listing of related apps, it’s not that bad imo
But the name of the website is “Alternative To,” not “Related To.” For example, if I’m looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I don’t want to see recommended video editors or 3D modeling apps. That is wasting my time with auto-generated page filler.
With a little sifting it’s helped me several times /shrug
Kagi users HATE pinterest.
Perfectly reasonable.
Reddit. I blocked the domain when the blackout started and haven’t been back.
Same. Even if I did want to find answers there, so many people have deleted comments that it can be useless at times.
I want to so bad but i end up finding answers there so often and using it for human responses i can’t. Damn You reddit.
The kicker was the aggressive popups to login and share your location.
At least w3schools made a effort to improve.
I typically Blocklist it. But when I’m coaching juniors and see them search, I remember how annoyed I am with that site.
geeksforgeeks
I’ve just killed the popup with uBlock and it’s pretty usable, was driving me mad before though, fuck that shit
tutorialspoint is similarly bad, they are mostly SEOed sites. Sometimes also giving wrong or misleading information.
Forbes, Pinterest, Quora, Chegg, and a few others that are basically clones of the above.
Also any website that prompts me to pay a subscription to keep reading after the first paragraph; and any website that requires me to disable my ad blocker (unless I can fix it by manually ad blocking their anti-ad-blocker message/screen filter, which always feels great lol).
Forbes also just… To put it professionally, ever since they started writing articles on topics none of their journalists know shit about, they just come across as a bunch of idiots to me.
Well to be fair to the actual journalists, a lot of those articles are published by random people with an agenda that are labeled “Contributor” as opposed to staff.
I don’t blacklist on the ip level but I do use a userscript to blacklist domains from showing up in my search results
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites
These are the domains currently blocked
9to5google.com about.fb.com about.instagram.com business.instagram.com cnet.com developer.android.com developers.google.com ebay.com facebook.com facebookbrand.com fileproinfo.com gadgets.ndtv.com guidebooks.google.com help.instagram.com lifehacker.com microsoft.com orangefreesounds.com research.fb.com rover.ebay.com support.google.com support.ring.com twitter.com www.addictivetips.com www.androidauthority.com www.androidheadlines.com www.collectorsweekly.com www.digitaltrends.com www.howtogeek.com www.instagram.com www.lifewire.com www.quora.com www.storyblocks.com www.theverge.comOoh - a couple of sites missing from my searxng yaml file. Cheers!
Pinterest. It is the sole reason I use the Google Hit Hider script.
I don’t host an instance but I would definitely block userbenchmark
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=RQSBj2LKkWg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
