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.

    • sprl@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

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

      • Tikiporch@lemmy.world
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        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.

      • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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        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!

      • mctit@lemmy.world
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        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.

      • livus@kbin.social
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        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
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      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.

    • nostalgicgamerz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

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

      On mobile I 100% block Pinterest

    • lemonadebunny@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

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

      • shapesandstuff@feddit.de
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        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
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    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.

    • DrQuint@lemmy.world
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      1 year 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@feddit.de
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        1 year 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@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year 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.

    • Bunnylux@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

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

  • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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”

  • Ghoelian@feddit.nl
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    1 year 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.

  • mat3ck@lemmy.ml
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    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.

      • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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        1 year 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.

          • NecessaryWeevil@feddit.nl
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            1 year 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.

  • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

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

  • Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

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

    • jecht360@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • dexahtm@lemm.ee
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      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.

  • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      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

    • Joojele@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

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

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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).

    • RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • ProfessorPeregrine@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • cmysmiaczxotoy@lemm.ee
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    1 year 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