Which sites do you blacklist from your internet searches?

EthanolParty, 10 months ago

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.

Bunnylux, 10 months ago

Yep, I do this too. Reddit became my defacto search engine for anything gone wrong in my life almost because… Its a forvm…

DrQuint, 10 months ago

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.

MaggiWuerze, 10 months ago

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

EthanolParty, 10 months ago

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.

Zapp, 10 months ago

Pinterest. Hands down the best quality of life site block.

Before I found an extension to silence them, that putrid site would infest all of my image searches with its gatekeeping bullshit.

NENathaniel, 10 months ago

I’ve never considered black listing a site before tbh. Do you guys find it worth the effort when you could just, not click on the links?

DeltaTangoLima, 10 months ago

All the socials, including Reddit.

WittyProfileName2, 10 months ago

Fandom.

Addfwyn, 10 months ago

You don’t want to use a wiki that makes your battery start to visibly drain away?

cmysmiaczxotoy, 10 months ago

I don’t blacklist on the ip level but I do use a userscript to blacklist domains from showing up in my search results

greasyfork.org/…/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-…

These are the domains currently blocked

<span style="color:#323232;">9to5google.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">about.fb.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">about.instagram.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">business.instagram.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cnet.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">developer.android.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">developers.google.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">ebay.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">facebook.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">facebookbrand.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">fileproinfo.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">gadgets.ndtv.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">guidebooks.google.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">help.instagram.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">lifehacker.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">microsoft.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">orangefreesounds.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">research.fb.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">rover.ebay.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">support.google.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">support.ring.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">twitter.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.addictivetips.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.androidauthority.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.androidheadlines.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.collectorsweekly.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.digitaltrends.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.howtogeek.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.instagram.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.lifewire.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.quora.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.storyblocks.com
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.theverge.com
</span>

DeltaTangoLima, 10 months ago

Ooh - a couple of sites missing from my searxng yaml file. Cheers!

jman6495, 10 months ago

Pinterest.

argentcorvid, 10 months ago

://picclick.com/

Just reposts old ebay listings as far as I can tell. I guess it could come in handy if you want some historical price data or something, but it mostly just craps up the search results.

Fleppensteijn, 10 months ago

I’d be happy if there is a way to block webshops. You can block e.g. Amazon but then there will be another shop in its place.

I wasn’t so happy with Searx but I think I’ll have a look at SearXNG if blocking is an option

mim, 10 months ago

In SearXNG you can redirect, or block domains (but you still need to define them). You need to enable the “Hostname replace” pluging in the setting.yaml

<span style="color:#323232;">enabled_plugins:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  - 'Hostname replace'  # see hostname_replace configuration below
</span>

And then define the rules like this:

<span style="color:#323232;">hostname_replace:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#   My redirects
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  '(.*.)?reddit.com$': 'old.reddit.com'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">#   My filters
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  'slant.co': false
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  'dailymail.co.uk': false
</span>

Potatos_are_not_friends, 10 months ago

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”

droans, 10 months ago

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?

Hazzia, 10 months ago

Genuine answer? Most places on the internet.

JWBananas, 10 months ago

You could try running for US Representative in NY’s third district?

dexahtm, 10 months ago

This website is so bad… it wants to make an account so badly lol

Wisely, 10 months ago

deleted_by_author

dexahtm, 10 months ago

That’s awesome. Although from what i’ve heard and seen the answers aren’t all too great.

Steeve, 10 months ago

Hey, I wouldn’t have passed first year calculus without the help of a physics forums user named DickHandy

Potatos_are_not_friends, 10 months ago

Geeksforgeeks.org

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.

LufyCZ, 10 months ago

geeksforgeeks

I’ve just killed the popup with uBlock and it’s pretty usable, was driving me mad before though, fuck that shit

Joojele, 10 months ago

tutorialspoint is similarly bad, they are mostly SEOed sites. Sometimes also giving wrong or misleading information.

Ghoelian, 10 months ago

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.

dexahtm, 10 months ago

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

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime, 10 months ago

If you ever do web dev (even just occasionally edit HTML), I highly recommend blocking w3cschools.com. it’s not just lacking, it’s often flat wrong.

JBloodthorn, 10 months ago

I've found that used to be more true than it is lately. I think they're making an effort now.

DrQuint, 10 months ago

Which one do you abide by? Maybe the mozilla one or perhaps caniuse?

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime, 10 months ago

Both those two are fantastic!

mat3ck, 10 months ago

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).

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…/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.

promodel, 10 months ago

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.

grue, 10 months ago

Aww, alternativeto.net isn’t that bad…

Potatos_are_not_friends, 10 months ago

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.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime, 10 months ago

If you take it for what it is, a listing of related apps, it’s not that bad imo

NecessaryWeevil, 10 months ago

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.

SnowdenHeroOfOurTime, 10 months ago

With a little sifting it’s helped me several times /shrug

RickyRigatoni, 10 months ago

Kagi users HATE pinterest.

Perfectly reasonable.