this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 210 points 10 months ago (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 87 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I’d add Quora to that list of fuck you websites

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

They added Quora+ subscription service now, you have to pay to see the actually correct answers. Free only gets you wrong answers.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I made the mistake of making an account one time. Unsubscribing from all the shit they email is an unbelievably annoying task.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's the worst. There's even a browser extension to blacklist them: unpinterested.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

I had to get that because I got so tired of having to put minus pinterest in all my image searches.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What do people not like about Pinterest? I've actually found them very useful for finding pictures of my niche subjects

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Genuine answer? Most places on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

This is great!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Never had heard of this site. I just kept skipping over but thus makes it so easy that I'm getting onboard!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Those ublock lists are interesting. Will definitely be stealing them for my searxng config.

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 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).

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

I never bothered actually creating blacklists for my browser. Mentally though, those weird websites that only rehost stack overflow replies.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Aww, alternativeto.net isn't that bad...

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Kagi users HATE pinterest.

Perfectly reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Reddit. I blocked the domain when the blackout started and haven’t been back.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Same. Even if I did want to find answers there, so many people have deleted comments that it can be useless at times.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 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

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

Pinterest. It is the sole reason I use the Google Hit Hider script.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 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

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.com
[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don't host an instance but I would definitely block userbenchmark

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 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

enabled_plugins:
  - 'Hostname replace'  # see hostname_replace configuration below

And then define the rules like this:

hostname_replace:
#   My redirects
  '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': 'old.reddit.com'
#   My filters
  'slant\.co': false
  'dailymail\.co\.uk': false
[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Just some very spammy or scammy domain:

Pinterest is only in my "lower" list because I’ve had some very few occasions (extremely long tail image searches) where pinterest was actually the best result, I just don’t want them to be in front of all the superior results

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Dailymail.co.uk

Fucking crazy propaganda

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Also the Sun, or any other British tabloid. Like fox news in the US, they have no obligation or desire to tell the truth. They make their living off riling up the racist idiots and getting payoffs when they vote for the Tories

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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