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] 234 points 1 year ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 101 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year 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] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year 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.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year 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] 28 points 1 year ago (2 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] 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year 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 1 year ago (2 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?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year 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] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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] 41 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

This is great!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year 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] 25 points 1 year 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] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Kagi users HATE pinterest.

Perfectly reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year 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 1 year 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] 20 points 1 year 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] 17 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year 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?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not op, but I have been doing this for years with a userscript. Getting rid of SEO garbage, pintrest, quora, etc links makes more room for the helpful results.

It is also a good way to ensure you don't land on any recipe sites that are built more for wasting your time than helping you cook.

I just got into the habit of permabanning any site that had anti-user patterns, annoying popups, right click/back button blocking, or clickbait headlines. I don't see a lot of that stuff anymore. Makes the net a bit more useful. Or at least less frustrating.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year 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] 9 points 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Dailymail.co.uk

Fucking crazy propaganda

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year 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] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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