Name and shame: my personal ones are cplusplus.com and w3schools.com.

When you search for a file extension, almost always those useless sites pop up that are just advertisements for a ``driver manager" or ``registry cleaner". The justsolve wiki[1] is a pretty good resource for file extensions, but it's not popular enough yet to rank high in search results.

[1]: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/

After looking into it a bit it seems like a good resource, but a few tweaks would be handy:

- TLS would improve the site ranking and make it look much more serious. These days plain HTTP is just a red flag.

- "This Site's URL is permanently http://fileformats.archiveteam.org!" is the first thing I see. That's just weird. Who actually cares? And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user? This is just confusing and makes the site look like it hasn't changed since the 90s.

- "First Time Visiting This Wiki? Please read the Statement of Project to understand why this project exists. Then check out the FAQ for some frequently asked questions about the project and its goals and procedures. Finally, brush up on the guidelines for Editing." Err, no, that's not what any first time user would do, that's what power users might do.

I imagine that right now, it's mostly an internal site for people involved in Archive Team to build out content, and there's an intent to actually publish this as something end users might find useful later.

I’m a first time user and I looked at those pages and found it pretty valuable since the site itself isn’t really clear.

I’d expect a site like this to have a big list of extensions on the first page.

> And when was the last time you saw a URL spelled out with the protocol part visible to the end user?

In my URL bar right now. It requires a browser that respects one's intelligence.

Of course, I use Firefox as well :) I meant on a web page.

The justsolve wiki is actually really valuable and good information, but the name always makes me think it's a spam site.

For me it’s the stackoverflow and github comment scrapers. They often clutter up my results greatly.

I hate those, but they're so many that you'd need a community maintained list to keep track of them all…

I have often wondered about the point of those websites. What do they win out of this?

Ads pay money now!

that sweet advertising money.

Would there really be enough revenue to warrant doing this, considering 1) scraping and hosting that content requires some effort, 2) the content would (should?) be penalized for plagiarism so they would have very little traffic and 3) developers are probably the worst audience to try and monetize with ads due to the prevalence of ad blockers.

Most people who code are not developers.

Mine and my partners parents learned c (badly) at some point. Nearly everyone on the b2b customer support team at my last job could sling some js. A surprising number of marketers learn to wrangle some carousels/buttons/etc. vba script excel monster stories are prevalent.

These people are great to monetize. They are paid well and doing something they don't understand well.

I see them in search results often enough (sometimes even before the SO post they've scraped) that it seems to be working, and the search engines (both DDG and Google for me) haven't caught on.

> and the search engines haven't caught on.

Sure they have. They just don't care as long as they made their quick buck off of it.

Very little traffic, yet enough to be annoying?

The data is provided as a downloadable dump, so it's really just a basic read only CMS.

These are what immediately jumped to mind when I read what this extension does.

GitHub should make them against the ToS.

Fucking quora!

For image search, fucking pinterest!

Pinterest is somehow getting its tentacles beyond image search now, too. I was recently researching interior paint colours and if I do a search like "interior colours dark walls" (NOT image search) then of the first 10 results there are 3(!!) Pinterest results from three different domains - .com, .co.nz and .co.uk (I'm sure your results will differ based on your region).

It's incredible to me that Google isn't doing SOMETHING to prevent Pinterest from duking their results, and actually seems to be losing ground to Pinterest's SEO dark patterns.

Of the remaining 6 results on that page, 3 of them were low-quality articles with generic language about paint schemes and lots of images, ALL of which had those little Pinterest share badges on them. I don't know it for a fact, but I strongly suspect that these ubiquitous types of websites are either produced in Pinterest's own content mills or are paid for by Pinterest marketing teams.

I really dont get how they've gotten away with it this long. Google killed off eHow relatively quickly after we started doing our shady SEO practices but yet...

I have a feeling it's not SEO, but that Google themselves are favoring more domains over another based on a hidden factor. If you search for recipes you get the same thing, a bunch of results from big media organizations but very few (or none at all) results from smaller forums, self-run sites etc.

If I were to put my cynical tinfoil hat on, I would say Google has optimized a lot of search results to be favored towards sites which heavily advertise/track their users. Google results are no longer "search term" being matched to "content" but there are additional layers which do more magic, like "is this publisher considered favorable or trustworthy to Google" and "will this result generate a positive ROI for Google".

Google has a team of human evaluators called Raters that use a criteria.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

You can read about what the criteria is, but in short, it directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites.

I... did not know this. It's good to know that Google is also responsible for killing the non-corporate web alongside Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps more insidiously.

This is (i think) also happening with youtube. There were a bunch of funny political videos a couple of years ago (eg. "Trump insult compilaton" etc., from different independent individuals), and searching for those terms now just shows videos from CNN, BBC, ABC, CNBC, and other corporate media houses.

That's a very cynical take away from a document saying expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are the most important measures of page quality.

I can see how forums would take a hit because users are anonymous, but personal blogs and niche websites should be rated high. Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines. This would seem to go more so for niche websites as demonstrated expertise should be more apparent.

Note that site reputation was listed as the very least important metric.

I doubt anyone else read all 168 pages, but can you direct me to the page that supports your claim? I didn't find anything that I would qualify as "directly asks raters to boost established sites and downrank things like forums, personal blogs, and niche websites."

> Assuming the blog owner has some expertise to back their work, then just listing a relevant Ph.D. or other professional affiliations on the site about page would be more than good enough to fit these guidelines.

That is pretty exclusive, IMO.

Obviously I haven't read this whole thing during my lunch break but if what you say is true then it explains a lot about why search quality has suffered the last ten years.

Forums, personal blogs and niche websites are often exactly what I want.

Google for sure favors sites with its analytics code.

I know for a fact that isn't true. But I'm curious what gives you that impression?

Because to optimize the analytics, you optimize the site for analytics and inherently give Google more detailed data. There’s no way Google isn’t using that data.

The incentives are aligned for Google to do this. I'd like to believe that they don't.

Can you point to anything that might convince skeptical non-Googlers that Google does not do this?

Do you have a source for this?

You just weren't shady enough to get away with it.

Goddamn Pinterest. No I don't want to sign up for Pinterest just to look at this pic that Google Image Search thinks is available to the general internet!

WTF Google how do you still allow this crap?

Firefox still has "view image" option, fortunately.

There is also this: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/view-image/ which puts the "view image" button back on to google image search results.

I haven't needed that, it just works when I click on the picture then right click on the drill down.

If you right click on the larger image that appears in the dark sidebar popout in Chrome(ium), and select 'View image..' that also works (most of the time).

Problem with that is you'll be downloading the Google cached image, not the source imagine, so the quality is usually worse.

When I worked for google as SRE for the web crawler, I low key advocated for de-indexing pinterest, but didn't get anywhere, (this is unsurprising, I was a nobody there.) I have no insight into why they don't de-index pinterest, but I know pinterest was on the radar as a thing of some sort. Meantime, I just add "-site:pinterest.*" to image queries... which I gather is probably more or less the sort of thing this addon does.

You don't have to answer this if you don't feel like it, but I always wondered if "-site:food.bar" is a search signal against that web site when Google ranks domains.

It's sad, because Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers. I was glad when Quora started to outcompete Yahoo Answers, but now Quora is full of long opinionated diatribes. It's been totally useless to me for the last 3 years.

>Quora used to be kinda good, or at least better than Yahoo Answers

I think that's what they call "damning with faint praise"

Indeed. I did a ctrl-f on the comments to see if someone had mentioned Pinterest already. Basically everyone I know who uses the internet consciously (as opposed to say people like my parents who "click the e on the desktop") would install this if this only came with this one website it blocks, period. And as others wrote not only in an image search, but for all searches. As soon as you search for something that can be vaguely expressed visually (home renovation, clothing, layout, ...) pinterest will somehow force its way into the results.

I just assumed that I failed to understand how pinterest works. Why is that even around?

How could they realistically lose money?

The idea behind pinterest is that unsuspecting users grant it legal immunity and full worldwide free distribution rights on everything that they "upload".

So basically, it's a convenience plugin for copyright infringement. Add some ads to other people's content and you're making money.

I wanted this article from years ago:

https://gizmodo.com/a-gasmask-becomes-the-most-terrifying-sh...

Googling “gas mask shower head” gave me a Pinterest dump for pages

Just tried this, and on the first page 2 are non-pinterest, and 7 pinterest of various tld. This pollution makes me hate pinterest with a passion.

w3schools.com used to be crap but recently it just gives you what you need to know right away with a couple of examples without delving into the epistemology of what each object, unlike mdn, w3c and the like. It's the next best thing after stackoverflow when it comes to getting the most likely answers quickly.

W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.

> W3Schools deserves a break IMO. Sure, it's not the best resource and I wouldn't rely on it when learning new things, but it's handy when you know roughly what you want and need a quick reminder of the syntax.

Even in that case W3schools is mostly good for getting in the way of the much more useful MDN link that should be the top result.

I agree in theory, they improved and surely the result of improvement should be a stopping of the punishment, but I still can't make myself click the links.

Anyway when I know exactly the method I want I just add mdn to the search to make it come up. Especially because if it is a specific method I probably want a deep dive, not just some examples.

The lack of information in w3s can cause confusion. I had a recent example when looking for an interaction in CSS that seemed completely bonkers to me that was immediately explained in the first paragraph of MDN. I decided to look up how it was documented on w3s (disclaimer: I hate it) and they never even mention it.

Sorry for it not being a concrete example, it was last week and I don't have access to my machine atm.

For me, "delving into epistemology" is critical. A straight-up answer, no explanation given, is next to worthless, as I have nothing to evaluate the correctness, completeness, and usefulness of the answer.

It's also host to a pretty useful experiment page to try things out yourself. It's great for whipping up small scale prototypes with.

You can also use e.g. https://codesandbox.io/ if you want to quickly whip up some prototype.

my least favorites are the generic "difference between" sites, none of whose domains I can remember at the moment. but they really drive me nuts when I want to find results from people who actually know what they're talking about.

Yes, the ones that say the difference between React and Angular is React has 4,000 GitHub stars. There is a world where “there’s no relevant article” is a better answer than... these results.

I didn't want to name call, but here they go- tutorialspoint.com and geeksforgeeks.org

Precisely due to the existence of these two websites, Quora and cplusplus.com I have a custom Google search engine using a whitelist I created specifically to exclude these and include bloggers from standards committees and other people I follow

How does this work? I like the idea of a search engine which only searches domains I have whitelisted.

Are you using this?

https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/

A tool that does that on Reddit would be useful too. I don’t need commondreams and theroot opinion articles...

Reddit Enhancement Suite [1] can do that for you - and more.

[1] https://github.com/honestbleeps/Reddit-Enhancement-Suite

thx!

commondreams? Are you by chance browsing /r/politics? I find the most useful way to browse /r/politics is to sort by controversial because it pierces the bubble.

/r/politics is just the left version of /r/the_donald, and they're both insufferable.

I miss the niche subs with quality discussion and content, but the rest of Reddit just started overflowing there too and ruined it.

I do not regret deleting my account. Although whenever a web search returns a Reddit link, I don't have RES and old.* redirect to make the site usable any more. Don't know how anyone uses new Reddit.

You're better off just installing something like Boost or Baconreader on your phone to take care of Reddit links from searches. I haven't touched Reddit on a desktop system in over a year because it's just easier to use an app and not have to deal with the ridiculously awful redesign or fiddle with RES.

There are still some useful niche communities. r/bonsai is still about bonsai and relatively meme free. r/amateurradio is ok too

I use a Chrome extension that automatically redirects me to 'old' reddit

If you're searching just the one site then the site: prefix (e.g. site:reddit.com, site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit>) works a treat.

Yes, That's the one! You create a set of rules and you can publicly publish your url. I have one specifically for programming related searches and one for news.

You can have URL patterns for example: en.cppreference.com/<asterisk>

Edit: I wasn't able to get the star to work in the post

wow, i thought geeksforgeeks is like leetcode.

Somewhat, but it's more about explanations and implementations of common algorithms that appear in interviews etc. Unfortunately, everything outside the algorithms is very low-effort SEO content. I'd be happy excluding it from my search results and only go there when I need to look up a specific algorithm.

Even the common algorithm implementations have been rather low-quality.

Don't forget Stackshare. One of the most disgusting tech spam websites of all time.

Iirc, they didn’t used to be utter shit. They are now.

They were featured here 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568181

As someone who learned (and is still learning) C++ on the job, what's wrong with cplusplus?

I don't think you ever stop learning C++... :)

But I trust cppreference more for the details, which are often necessary for C++ because, well, the devil's in the details. (And to be totally honest, the styling is just nicer.)

Compare the docs for std::vector for example, cplusplus[0] and cppreference[1]. The former spends three paragraphs explaining the internals, whereas the latter only spends one. The latter also includes information about what's been introduced on which language version (11, 17, 20) and assorted facts that the former doesn't discuss, e.g. the various container contracts that vector fulfills.

[0] http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/vector/vector/

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/vector

I also used cplusplus.com a lot when learning, and (as far as I can tell) it's basically fine, but cppreference.com has been my go-to for quite a while now. The latter is subjectively more complete/precise/helpful to me (and it's just as a good a reference for C, which is actually what I mostly use it for).

I'm curious what saagarjha's experience is, too.

cplusplus.com just has worse information; it annoys me because it outranks cppreference.com and I have never been the the former and said "gee, I'm glad I came here because it had better details".

Nothing, it's a fine reference. But I could see people wanting to skip it in the top results.

And pinterest, expertsexchange and a bunch of others. Right now I blackhole them in the DNS, being able to strip them out of serps is a great idea, it puts the lie to Google serving you what you want though.

w3schools cleaned up their act and I find it a very useful website these days. Even https://www.w3fools.com/ says so now.

Searching for images and getting pinterest.com results for me.

experts-exchange.com

expert-sexchange.com

w3schools

I look to the bottom of the page every time to avoid this terror...

Medium

wikihow.com

webmd.com

mayoclinic.com

thoughtcatalog.com

livestrong.com

tutorialspoint.com

I'm really surprised to see Mayo Clinic on here. It's one of the few trustworthy sources of medical info on the internet.

In my experience, Mayo Clinic and several other similar sites are ranked far too highly by Google for the paltry information they offer. I can somewhat understand why Google has chosen to deliberately suppress more information-rich sources like Wikipedia specifically for medical queries, but I find it to be extremely annoying. When I search for information about a disease online, I'm usually not trying to use Google as a substitute for asking my doctor, and I don't appreciate Google trying to funnel me to sites that are dumbed down. My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.

> My use case when searching for information about a disease is usually to explore broader information about the disease, not just look up a listing of most common symptoms.

OK, I see the problem, and I'm not sure how Google can solve it. The problem is that you are unlike the vast majority of other Google users. Most of the time someone is searching for an illness, it's because they think they (or someone they know) has it. Mayo Clinic is great for that.

I personally sometimes search for more detail, but then I usually go directly to Wikipedia (which has as much info as a layperson like me can understand, but much more than Mayo Clinic).

That's exactly where I'm coming from.

I don't think WebMD is a bad source. Their drug interaction checker is great.

>wikihow

I love wikihow, but probably not for the reasons they want to be loved.

There's a whole group fascinated by the illustrations - multiple subreddits dedicated to it. This is one of them https://www.reddit.com/r/wikiwhat/

A more popular one: https://old.reddit.com/r/disneyvacation/

I can't wait until I get home and try this. I am completely sick to death of Google image search results being full of videos. It's impossible to find an actual gif to imbed in an HTML comment post because the results are drowning in videos from Giphy, Tenor, etc. It'll be so delicious to consign them to oblivion.

Edit: unfortunately it doesn't work on image search. Oh well.

Seconding this for Tenor. They certainly know how to game Google for traffic, then stop users from getting what they want

Thank you so much for this. Was looking for something similar, found only solutions that were dependent on extensions I didn't want to install due to privacy/security reasons.

Thanks. Same here and I tried to keep it as vanilla as possible. Let me know if and I can improve it (either here or using Github issues).

Can we have the option of not showing the removed results? Or maybe just show small notification on top "some results were removed by Wiper, click here to show them"?

Otherwise some search results might still be plagued with offenders, though admittingly their presence is much more sufferable.

Apparently some people prefer the fact that the results are not fully removed. I have a better idea- to let the users decide it, so for v.1.0 I'm going to take these two ideas into account: 1. CSS-ify to suppress the results, 2. Remove them fully.

Firstly, thank you for building this I have exactly the same itch and I'm so glad someone provided a way to scratch it.

> The plugin maintains a persistent and customizable list of URLs (keywords) that are used as a 'blacklist' for stripping results.

Could you explain a little more about how the stripping of the 'blacklist' works.

OK, I suppose I could be slightly less lazy and read the source, which shows that you're iterating through the blacklist then iterating through the results page and removing elements that match. There are some default offenders blacklisted automatically by the look of it, nice and simple.

  var blacklist = new RegExp('https?:\/\/.*\.(geeksforgeeks|tutorialspoint).*\.*');

  function clearURLs(urls) {
      var i, j, arr, res, url;
      arr = [];
      res = document.querySelectorAll('div.rc');

      for (i = 0; i < res.length; i++) {
          for (j = 0; j < urls.blacklistURLs.length; j++) {
              if (res[i].firstChild.firstChild.getAttribute('href').indexOf(urls.blacklistURLs[j]) !== -1) {
                  arr.push(i);
              }
          }
      }
      arr = [...new Set(arr)];

      for (i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
          url = res[arr[i]].firstChild.firstChild.getAttribute('href');
          url = 'Wiper blacklisted URL: <a href="' + url + '">' + url + '</a>';
          res[arr[i]].parentElement.innerHTML = url;
      }
  }

  browser.storage.local.get('blacklistURLs').then(clearURLs);

And I just recently looked for something like this because I'm sick and tired of Google top-ranking results from Reddit, where someone asked an intelligent question, and there were zero responses. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an actually-useful response to a technical question on Reddit, but a link to a targeted subreddit always seems to be at the top of my search results now. I wonder how much this is costing Reddit. I hope it's a lot, and they stop this nonsense soon.

You sure that, reddit buys its place?

I rather suspect this has to do with the search algorithm favors known and big domains in the ever going on war against scam and fake sites.

I too have noticed the big 3 search engines serving more *eddit links than usual. And without retyping the url, (old.) the comments are hidden anyway so they are effectively a shade worse than useless.

You can add:

    -site:example.com

To your query to exclude all results from example.com

Then, you can configure your search bar to automatically add those terms to your query.

But that way you'd be avoiding the results completely(even in the unlikely event that they could be potentially helpful)

Amazing! Thanks!

We need this for YouTube as well, though the blacklist would be extremely large.

In fact, I wonder if this could be implemented as a filter list for uBlock Origin?

When I log out, YouTube becomes total trash, so I thought the algorithm was really customized to me. Then I visited a friend to watch some movies and saw half our recommendations were identical. Like we got placed in the same "bucket" or something.

I remember reading something that said is how spotify makes discover weekly playlists (but I can't find it now), so I wouldn't be too surprised

Cool! I did something similar for my own use, in Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/antibookmark/pobgf...

I use FF more nowadays, though, so I'll have to check yours out.

Which domains would you recommend adding to the blacklist for a HN crowd? It would be nice if this had some presets builtin.

I suppose you could contribute your own via a pull request.

I'd be more than pleased to merge your relevant pull requests.

Wonderful idea. I find google to be marginally useful. Mostly though it returns a barrage of low quality results like mentioned here in the comments, that might be related but you really don’t ever want to see. Obvious though it’ll never be allowed on chrome’s web store.