this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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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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[–] shapesandstuff@feddit.de 159 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Pinterest. Fuck pinterest.

[–] sprl@lemm.ee 71 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 5 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!

[–] squaresinger@feddit.de 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] livus@kbin.social 8 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.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 11 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.

[–] lemonadebunny@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] shapesandstuff@feddit.de 19 points 1 year 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.

[–] EthanolParty@lemmy.sdf.org 50 points 1 year 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.

[–] jman6495@lemmy.ml 38 points 1 year ago
[–] Ghoelian@feddit.nl 33 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.

[–] dexahtm@lemm.ee 4 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

[–] promodel@kbin.social 23 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.

[–] grue@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Kagi users HATE pinterest.

Perfectly reasonable.

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 22 points 1 year ago

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

[–] mat3ck@lemmy.ml 21 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.

[–] Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] dexahtm@lemm.ee 2 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.

[–] TotoroTheGreat@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

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

[–] cmysmiaczxotoy@lemm.ee 11 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

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

[–] NENathaniel@lemmy.ca 9 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?

[–] nom@nom.mom 13 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.

[–] Underpay@feddit.nl 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

*://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.

[–] SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 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.

[–] Ducks@ducks.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

Yeah. MDN is one of the best sites ever, and I don't think I've ever found a mistake on it

[–] JBloodthorn@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 6 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

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 2 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

All the socials, including Reddit.