Which sites do you blacklist from your internet searches?

mim@lemmy.sdf.org to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 265 points –

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.

77

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.

I mean sometimes Pinterest has images and if you use inspect element you can bypass all that shit

On mobile I 100% block Pinterest

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.

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...

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?

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

3 more...

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

3 more...

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

*://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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'll second this. Learned this a long time ago. Anything you think you need on w3c schools can be found elsewhere.

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

Dailymail.co.uk

Fucking crazy propaganda

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

Added to the filters. Thanks!

I would already not click it when searching for news, might as well automate it.