I've posted this before, but you can achieve the same with uBlock Origin static filters alone without having to install any additional extensions. For example:
To block results from specific domains on Google or DDG:
Having a button to remove the offending site right from the search results saves quite a bit of time, so while i usually prefer not to have extra extensions, i see a lot of utility here.
uBlock is a great blocker, but an absolutely garbage UI. Luckily the on/off button + 'Element Blocker' context menu entry do most of what I want without having to yet again try to decipher its cryptic icons.
I like ublock origin's UI. Its one of the best extension UI's Ive used. Simple and clear. It's bare bones for power users and I guess that makes it inaccessible, calling it garbage seems like overkill.
It's not clear though. I still have no idea what these columns mean, despite have been actively learning about them multiple times (as in, I have to re-learn every time I need to use them). They don't even have tooltips.
A good UI should be self-explanatory, this is not even close.
Wasn’t it though? Just click the “I’m an advanced user” button in the uBlock Origin options. Then you get the per-domain block details in the uBlock Origin extension button just like uMatrix.
Not denying that. However, unless I'd be blocking new domains on a weekly basis, I just don't think it's worth installing an additional extension for something that's so easily achieved without.
I've started blocking results using ublock last year after it has been mentioned here, and I've got to the point where I have a script I can use to generate the relevant filters for google/bing and a few other search engines.
When I spot any domain which has been squatted by SEO and useless comparison-alike websites I immediately block it. This has brought up the quality of results IMMENSELY.
The interesting thing is that Google could do this easily if they wanted to, but for some reason they don't. After all, if you can do it as an end user and in a low enough amount of time that it is worth it for you then surely Google can do it, they get to amortize that time across many more users.
Google in general has an aversion to giving users control. Their product vision is an omniscient AI that gives you enough of what you want that you'll tolerate the ads. The removal of user control is aided in many cases by justifications around security and UX design simplicity ("users don't know what they want"). But really it's about keeping control on the AI side.
That’s the ticket. “Many intelligent people go out of their way to silence this site” is EXACTLY the kind of signal I want to pump into my information retrieval system.
Should be possible to crowd source this and publish the result as a list that’s consumed by uBlock origin…
There's too much personal stuff on there for me to be comfortable sharing it as is, and I'm afraid I don't have time to distil the list this weekend either.
I'd be happy to create you some ready-made filters for any specific sites or other types of results that you'd like to get rid of though, just let me know!
No, no problem, if it is just for me, I figured that if this can be crowdsourced effectively it would really clean up the search results and that is worth it if enough people start using it.
It might even be enough to stick it on github or gitlab and start accepting pull requests against a starter list.
Is it possible to block/hide "People Also Search For" boxes in Google search results? It's annoying because each time you go back to search results, this little box re-aligns the whole list of results so you can't quickly click on the next search result.
Kagi also goes one step further and allows you to "pin" sites to the top. For example, I've got MDN pinned, so whenever I'm searching for web stuff they're the top result, even if there's an SEO'd blog post that normally would have come first.
Abandoning Google is a huge motivator for me, but this feature set is why it's my primary search engine. Google tries to guess what I want and just ends up feeding me the same garbage it feeds everyone else. Kagi allows me to correct it when it guesses wrong. That makes all the difference.
Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?
Pay per use is a great model for search and I wish we could use it. But I don”t think the world is ready yet.
In our survey 90% of users told us they preffered fixed fee over pay per use and feedback we got was that pay per use would make them anxious to use search. Also it adds additional friction in the signup flow (where the idea of paid search is already a novelty and then pay per search?) and so we decided to go with a fixed monthly price.
Sweet spot would be $15-$20/month but this way we would not have enough users, and less users equals leas feedback to build product. Our pricing is subject to a change, we had to launch with a price and we’ve chosen one that was good compromise.
We are likely to introduce pay per use first in our enterprise plan. Pricing Kagi is an extremely difficult intelectual challenege. (Kagi founder here)
Maybe you could do something similar to Google Fi's pricing model for data usage. You pick a monthly amount of data, say 2GB, for a monthly price of $40. Any GB you use in excess of that is $10 per GB up to a maximum of $80, and data usage is unlimited after that.
I would bet that my usage most months would not exceed $5, and I think many other prospective users would be willing to gamble on that as well. Food for thought.
I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.
But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side.
At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed.
One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)
Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
The company is aiming to have many users that everyone is overpaying with their $10, so that they make money, thanks to the reduced marginal cost. And the company hopes that the $10 is low enough that enough everyone knows they are overpaying they are still willing.
Yeah, $10 is steep, but I feel like I'd be happy with a bundle deal. Search, reliable email, a small bit of storage, and other small services for $20 or $30. I'm sure I'm underestimating how much I use search, but it just doesn't feel like an essential part of my life that I'd want to pay that much.
I'd honestly rather see Kagi focus entirely on search and not try to branch out too much. These days, I think startups try to chew up too many markets at once instead of really honing in on one.
The synergy is in the fact that email and storage are high margin products. We are currently basically losing money on search. Cost of providing email per user is negligible (compared to search) but you could double the price and make the economics work.
From their usage panel, I do 50-200 research per day.
In 10 days my usage cost is estimated at 11.69$. It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi.
I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge.
Correction: they're saying 80 searches cost them ~1$.
>Why does Kagi cost $10/month?
>Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.
>Someone searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3. An average Kagi beta user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal due to testing etc.
>Our goal is to find the minimum price at which we can sustain the business. If it turns out that we have more room we will decrease it. But it can also be that we may need to increase it.
>The free plan will be limited to 50 searches a month (and this too has to be paid by paying customers which makes the above math even harder).
How... do 80 searches cost them a dollar? That seems insanely high unless they're counting fixed costs that'll go down fast (on a per-search basis) as they get more subscribers.
8,000 searches costing a dollar, in actual resource use? OK, maybe. Still seems a little high, but maybe. 80? Are they paying someone to manually look things up for you?
I think I remember somewhere that they said a very high percentage of searches are totally unique i.e. never queried before thus not served from cache. I don't think they reword searches like Google does for a higher cache hit rate.
I never thought about that. That could explain a lot. Although I also recall Google themselves saying a lot of their queries are totally unique anyway.
> Although I also recall Google themselves saying a lot of their queries are totally unique anyway.
Which is probably why search quality is going down. They're rewriting your query to a more common way of saying the same thing, at least according to Google.
Kagi is completely bootstrapped. It has basically 10 developers and me doing everything else. No managers. The expense is low as humanely possible as still coming out of my own pocket.
It is the cost of commercial APIs that we use. We can't get volume discounts because we dont have volume, not are ever likely to have volume similar to free search engines.
I'd challenge that the cost per search is actually very low. For just 1.25 cents, you can search the entire world wide web with any query, find what you need with no distractions and all that in just 500ms. The value of that search outcome for you can be $10 or even $100. It is probably the most amazing return on investment existing in the world today. Imagine for a second that Google and other search engine didn't exist, and someone offered you this deal today. I'd be you'd take it in a hearbeat. Heck you may even consider paying $1 per search or even $5. So the value is there.
But today this value is anchored in the price of 'free' search. So instead $1 per search sounding like a good deal, we struggle to accept that 1.25 cents is.
We hope that for a portion of people that 1.25 cents per search is going to sound like an amazing deal, especially as this is the only search relationship where the incentives of the information provider are aligned with the incentives of the information consumer.
While I agree that it probably have a lot of value, the issues is human brains.
I don't feel 1 cents per search is a good deal at all, while -logically- it probably will give me more than 1 cent of value out of it.
People never thought about how much the knowledge they acquired is worth, most of the time they share it free of charge, people like to share, somes will even pay hosting to share knowledge !
That's why I don't believe in the pay-as-you-go I'm fine with a subscription, I don't pay to have more value out of my search, but because:
1. I dont like ads, I want to support an ad free alternative.
2. I pay for my privacy.
3. Better results will mean less time lost on searching, less frustration.
I never accounted the value I will get out of better search, I looked at the price and felt that I was a bit overpriced for my taste, but I want an ad-free, pro privacy internet.
I didn’t know Kagi was bootstrapped. As a fellow bootstrapper, it makes me like Kagi even more. Good luck in the future. I think you really have something here so I hope the monetization strategy works.
> I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge.
Sure, but this whole adventure won't last very long if the company loses money even on paying customers. If your usage costs them about $30 a month but you only pay $10, who will pay the remaining $20? Someone has to finance your access to knowledge in the end...
Correct, we are betting that avg user will cost us less than $10 in the future. Our current userbase is skewing towards HN - heavy usage. If that does not happen, we will have to change the price. Cost per search is unlikely to (significantly) change without (significantly) jeopardizing the quality of results we are known for.
Most of my queries through the day aim a few hundred of website - programming docs- I wouldn't mind if Kagi automatically chose my lenses(current one are too limited) if it reduce research cost.
No, it's industry standard to operate at a deficit to gain userbase and subscriptions. They're certainly prioritizing shipping product right now over reducing COGS, but you can bet that if they're successful in the short-term that in a couple years they'll be able to significantly reduce cost per search.
A lot of services operate like that.
France ISP offer unlimited data with very low price, because they know the average usage, and I'm perfectly fine with that.
You'll get used to it. Of course you won't limit your access to knowledge just to save $20 monthly.
How much does it cost to have a suboptimal search experience 50-200 times every day? Saving 5 seconds (on average) per search, that's something like $10 per day in savings (provided you search during work hours).
As someone who prefers to search in private tabs, I was wondering why do I need to create an account, until I saw the pricing. It's an interesting conundrum, either you search anonymously with bloat and ads, or have your activity pinned to your account maybe with ads, or guaranteed without ads for $10/month.
As much as it bothers me, I'd prefer to work around the first option.
I need to get around to signing up. I started a couple weeks back, but stalled about some question re: what search means to you, or something like that, went off for a while to think about it, and never went back.
Guess I need to just write "finding stuff" or something trite and get on with it.
(don't ask me open-ended questions as part of a signup process unless you want me to brain-lock and never finish the form :-) Though I just checked and it looks like the signup flow's very different and more normal now, so that's good)
You probably had to answer questions during their closed beta, so they could look for and invite specific user types as they ramped up. As of last week, IIRC, they're now in open beta. That could explain why their sign up flow changed.
Makes sense. I wasn't mad about it or anything, just noticed that it had that effect on me, and was like, "huh, weird". The three or four times I'd thought about going back, remembering that was there had stopped me, too ("eh, I don't want to get started and just end up abandoning it again, waste of time") until checking again after reading this thread.
...or use Grease/Tamper/Violent- monkey and the excellent Google Hit Hider by Domain[0] --which is free and [in spite of the name] works across all major search engines.
I feel like an evangelist for this script as I seem to mention it on an almost monthly basis here. But, as the saying goes "No connection. Just a happy user."
PS: as I said last time 'uBlacklist' was promoted here; whatever the merits of your product, trying to subconsciously associate yourself with the excellent 'uBlock Origin', by using a similar naming convention, is very shady.
PPS: reading the rest of the comments, I'm amazed at the number of people saying they've signed up for this, or intend to. $10 a month for something you could have for free --and we're supposed to be in recessionary times. It's true what they say about 'a fool and his money...'
You’re joking right? We’re on a forum where a good chunk of the people commenting have 6-figure salaries, some on the very high side of that. And some here have a lot more money than that.
$10/mo for something used many times every day is a drop in the bucket for many. It’s not true for all, but for many.
$10 for something that is minimal value is the path to ruin, especially when done by many people.
There’s opportunity cost (ie, what if I donated to charity, etc) but mainly I want to support high value products with some link to costs. All these “just the price of coffee” 4-hour-work-week type things are an unhealthy way of looking at the world.
I like open source so I can stop worrying about stuff that has near zero marginal costs.
I hate to think of a future where everything I enjoy or use is “just $10 every month.”
GHH just removes the results from the list, it doesn't add anything. I don't see how it could appeal to advertisers. EDIT: Oh, you're talking about Kagi. Gotcha.
About your PPS: I search from my own machine, from my work laptop, and from my phone. I also use different browsers. Maintaining a user script to “undo” crap results won’t work well in this scenario. Having those settings saved in the search engine itself is really nice!
I’m a paying Kagi user now, and this isn’t my first comment gushing over that product. :)
Kagi is even better than Google in my opinion. I’m still thinking whether I want to pay a subscription for it but it’s tempting since the results are so good. M
When I first switched from Google to DDG I found myself using g! all the time as I wasnt happy with the results, especially local such as finding a specific shop in my area etc. I dont recall using g! with Kagi, and when I was bored and compared the Kagi search result with Google to see if I was missing out, it turned to be the other way - I realised I was actually getting a much wider spectrum of results. I discovered many cool websites and blogs I never knew excited thanks to it or rather thanks to the fact that they show you what’s relevant to your search unlike Google that shows what they think is.
Try !s for Startpage when DDG doesn't have what you want. Startpage uses Google's index and is quite good. DDG and StartPage together give me more (and higher quality results) without Google's obnoxiously deceptive ads.
That was me a couple of years ago, I've tried DDG every year since it was announced on HN as a project. Google got worse and DDG got better, I use DDG mostly now (also Kagi and Brave, Google, and very occasionally Bing).
Kagi is honestly not good at all about local results. I use !g the most often when trying to find information about stores or restaurants. For all other "encyclopedic" knowledge, like Wikipedia (pinned), Stack Exchange, blogs, etc., Kagi has way less SEO spam than Google.
By local I meant like when I’m searching for Adidas trainers or garden fence panels it will bring up shops that sell it in UK and a lot of them are local as they have physical shop in my location. With DDG I was getting shops from America even when I had UK setting switched on. For example tool shops like Screwfix or Toolstation never came up in DDG whereas Kagi shows them on first page.
I didnt mean like places to eat near me etc. sorry. Not something I really do to be honest.
Ha! I'm the opposite. When I use someone else's computer, I get confused because the results are all crap, then I have to manually type duckduckgo.com into their URL bar.
At least Google Search has started blocking itself with a consent wall on new devices. It's the best feature from them in a while, at least for me. I wish their tracking stuff was opt in too.
A lot of people seem surprisingly happy with Kagi's results but I would like to put my hand up as someone who is, so far, underwhelmed and occasionally frustrated. I realise I've started automatically starting almost all of my searches with the prefix to search via Google instead. I recently reinstalled my desktop OS and I've been happily delaying configuring Kagi as my default browser search.
It's slower, sometimes painfully so (maybe due to downtime? Understandable but not fun). I really miss Google's cards; for example, finding opening hours for a local business is immediate in Google, but requires opening another link which may not even be correct in Kagi. When I'm searching errors or code examples, sometimes Kagi embeds a useless snippet with little relevance. Sometimes it has a bizarre 'memory effect' where one or two of the results will be ghosts from an earlier search but completely unrelated to the current search term.
It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.
Speed is on average faster than Google for most users, so if that is not the case for you please let us know via https://kagifeedback.org
And if there is any kind of bug, glitch or issue please also use kagifeedback.org
> It's not perfect. I'm suspicious of people pretending otherwise.
If is far from perfect. I would say we are 30% through what our vision for the product looks like. I can totally understand how it does not meet your expectation right now.
The beauty of our model is that people pay with their wallets, not their data, and the momemt the product sucks, we lose a customer (or don't get one like in your case). Incentives are perfectly aligned.
The fact that barely a week afer the public beta launch, over a thousand people already pay for Kagi, while still being in beta and (very) rough around the edges, is the greatest motivation we can have to serve our user community well and continuing improving the product in the future.
HN crowd for all their smartness are as ego-driven and as susceptible to human biases like everyone else.
Most opinions come from an irrational hate towards Google. (It's the nerd equivalent to be edgy/hip among peers by hating something popular).
Then there is sunk cost fallacy, like I pay $10, it must be good. It's not Google, it must be good (never mind that the founders of all these companies are all cut from the same silicon valley cloth and are equally good/evil/shades of grey)
Finally, it's the illusion of "Feel Good factors" -- Privacy, David vs Goliath
Yeah but I actually like the fact that Google knows what I search, because it adapts the results to what I care about. When I search for "python" I don't want to learn about snakes.
The results have been fine for me, the date filtering and archive.org results in particular have been really helpful. And as an FYI, Kagi runs their own web crawler, but also sources from Google & Bing.
Just tried the first example search "best laptop" and results are not really very useful - usually old content and none of the results showed the publishing dates of the articles. https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop
This is for sure a really hard question to answer, but I think we can agree that a 2017 blog post does not constitute the “idea results” for this query, no?
FWIW I was a beta tester, and (mostly) enjoyed my experience, but having this as a demo of Kagi’s abilities on your splash page does not inspire confidence in the product IMO.
Kagi's result showcases our philosophy of preferring non-commercial content to commercial/SEO/affiliate content. It may not be for everyone. If the users want that they can find the same link as Google's #1 in a section called listicles.
We show this example on purpose so that we manage expectations on what you will get Kagi from the very first interaction.
I was considering subscribing to Kagi but $10/month is almost as expensive as my fiber broadband connection and I don't think I can justify this expense. I would likely subscribe if it was $5/month.
I thought the same at first. Then I thought on an annual budget and price.
Does Kagi worth $120 per year for me ?
Yes, yes it does, it's barely nothing compared to the value of having proper search result. I checked ... I make more than 50 searches per day...
$120 yearly is nothing compared to other expenses that I have like my broadband internet around $70 per month for it...
My thought process was like that: i do 50 searches per day, i lose on average 3 seconds per search filtering ads, pinterest,quota,geekforgeek,etc. results. This means 150 second or 3 minutes a day. Which means 1.5 hours a month. My hourly rate is about $70 USD, so paying $10 to give me back $100 of my time seemed like a good deal.
Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like a great service and I'd love to support them, but as a student I just can't justify $10/month as long as Google with an adblocker is still an okay experience. Credit card being the only payment option is another problem, since I (like most people where I live) only have a debit card, with credit cards usually costing extra. I'll definitely keep an eye on kagi though, hoping for more payment options and a <$5 subscription.
It depends on the kind of debit card apparently. What I have is a girocard[1], which doesn't have the required 16 digit card number and CVC. I didn't even know that debit cards can have those. My online payments are usually made via SEPA bank transfers, Giropay[2] or Paypal.
I signed up for Kagi during the closed beta, and used it for a bit. But I kept going back to Google for some searches, the proportion of which was steadily increasing over time, until almost unconsciously I was tabbing down to "search with Google" every time I searched. At that point I figured it was a revealed preference and went back to Google.
It is great, I used it during their early-access, but the 10/month is a bit steep tbh. I would be more inclined to pay up at <5/month. One of my favourite features was the toggle for showing results only from discussion boards.
I started using it a couple of weeks ago, absolutely love it. I haven't gone back to google a single time yet.
I see people complain about a price, but I suspect also they complain about being tracked by google. I guess you can pick your poison. I think I'd rather pay a few bucks a month at this point, but to each his own.
Anyone who has tried to buy something obscure locally will probably find this useful. There are hundreds of fake webstores that pretend to be in different countries (using national TLDs and machine translation), then just redirect you to AliExpress. I have a script that can recognise them and add them to this blocklist.
Years ago, I made a FireFox addon for myself to do exactly this but everywhere on the internet. You specify a regular express to match attribute values and/or text, and the CSS to apply to the elements containing the matches. You can specify any CSS you want but if it's something like visibility: hidden or display: none it has this effect (and is the only thing I've actually used it for). It even worked on FireFox for Android when that supported proper addons.
It's really nice to never see a link to Facebook, Twitter, etc anywhere on the internet. It's almost like they don't exist. It causes a few oddities here and there (The text matching is problematic but it's optional, the attribute value matching works really well), but I've never missed anything important. I feel like if everyone had this power everywhere, it would serve as incentive for sites to not suck.
It took some fun javascript APIs I've never had to use before (like MutationObserver and TreeWalker) to get it to work right and efficiently, especially on sites that load content via JS (like Google).
To take the best advantage of this, you want to crank up the results per page setting in the search engine. This is because the deletions simply cut results form each page without the results being repaginated.
I made a lot of use of uBlacklist; but then I found Huawei's petalsearch.com, where pretty much none of the crap that I deleted appears in the first place.
uBlacklist is really just a band-aid solution for a garbage search engine; it doesn't address the root cause.
But I just tried the search terms "tiananmen square massacre" in PetalSearch. It comes up with the Wikipedia page on the subject, just like Google does.
The second result in PetalSearch points to the rationalwiki, whose text begins "The Tiananmen Square Massacre was a ruthless crackdown on a pro-democracy protest ..."; and that is quoted in the search result.
The next results after that are news items about Chinese censorship:
"China censors tank-shaped Viennetta ice cream on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre"
"China Censors Top Livestreamer, Fans Question Potential Link To Tiananmen Square Massacre Reference"
and others.
Seems all right to me.
Of course, I'm not able to repeat this test from within China; but how would Google and others fare there?
I'd argue all Q&A services devolve into madness when they get mainstream.
Before Quora we had yahoo answer and before that surely something else.
As soon as they get mainstream the quality of question and answer goes down. Those systems only work with well defined constraints either on the subject of the question or the validation of the expertise of the people answering.
All of those platform just open the valve with close to no moderation. We can see the same with Reddit and big sub Reddit.
This is largely platform’s fault though. Quora had every opportunity to stop site spammers from posting non-informative answers just to farm clicks for the blog posts they link to for the “full” answer.
Mind boggling that Google hasn’t penalised them since years ago.
Google didn't penalize Pinterest either. In Google image search, Pinterest results are abundant but clicking on them and viewing them requires a sign-up on Pinterest.
I still remember the good old days of Quora; it was a nice era but it's gone...
You think Quora is bad? Try blocking Pinterest from your search results. I swear those bastards have registered pinterest<dot><every-fucking-TLD-in-existence>
I think stack exchange's extraordinary resistance to content deterioration is largely due to the moderation atmosphere that I would describe as something akin to a particularly pedantic police state
I love stack overflow and all but I am so sick if very old answers showing as the top result in google. no I'm not using java 6 or laravel 4 or whatever
I wouldn't doubt many people click W3Schools results when they see them, they're not that bad, the explanation is straightforward, and it has exercises and a REPL for immediate practice. That reinforces their ranking as useful results.
Conversely, I have no idea why Pinterest plagues everything. Does it manage to trick many people into clicking for a login form?
W3Schools is the prime example that Google does use site authority for its ranking approach. A lot of their content is thin one-liners that don’t explain the subject you’re looking an answer for.
the biggest problem with google, for me, is their internal blacklist - nothing i can do to get them to stop censoring. this is a nice start though. still sticking with bing as the lesser of evils. i switch to google sometimes if i cant find what i want on bing (for non-controversial topics that google doesnt censor, its still the best)
Does anyone know how to manage firefox extension's permission?
This extension asks permissions to "Access for my data for google.*" and optionally "Access my data for all websites".
However, I don't want to give it access to the data for all websites. It is insane.
I want to have stricter permission control. For example, since I only use google and duckduckgo, I want to give this extension access for the data for google and duckduckgo.
Unfortunately the problem I most often encounter with "unwanted" search results is not isolated useless sites but when the results for anything shopping-related are multiple full pages of crappy SEO-spam results.
If anyone has tips for addressing this situation I'd be much obliged.
If any of the alternative search engines would offer this and a feature to block pages with affiliate links--like those "review" sites--I would be happy to pay for them. They need to offer ways to customize the search experience.
This only applies display:none to the bad sites which means for some queries, your entire search results might be empty
To get full results, you have to use "-site" but sadly Google limits queries to 32 words which means for a 5 word query, you can only "blacklist" up to 27 sites
My mind immediately went to uMatrix or uBlockOrigin. Just want to note that, so far as I can tell, this is not associated with the author (gorhill) of those other tools:
I wonder if I'm the rare minority who doesn't mind sites like geeksforgeeks because I don't use them as authoritative reference but just to lookup/double-check syntax and/or code examples. Their information isn't great but the code snippet is right there which ironically might not be the case with sites that have dense information but are low on examples. However, when I need the gory details, I just visually skip geeksforgeeks and its ilk from the search results.
Maybe we need a enable/disable toggle in uBlocklist to cater to the above "modes" of search.
Is there a way to do something complementary to this?
To curate a list of websites that have valuable information on some topic / domain, and have those results raised first?
I've been using Google Hit Hider, a userscript, for this for years. I can import/export my list, sites can be both "banned" and "blocked", I can de-duplicate and de-www my lists if needed, etc. It's very flexible. (Despite the name, it's DDG compatible as well) It's also completely free.
What advantages does this have over Google Hit Hider?
This is great, but the existing subscription lists leave a ton to desired, still. Porn for instance has huge amounts of SEO spam and yet there doesn't seem to be a list for that, which is surprising considering porn and its consumers are usually the first to adopt new tech.
Google used to allow this on its search page, but of course they couldn't have users filtering spam and trash out of their results that might cost Google a penny.
It's not an apple thing. It's a userscript, available on any browser that supports extensions like Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey - so both Chrome and FF.
What do you mean? Personally I'm trying to avoid any terms that imply that black==bad. Black people, just like other groups of people, experience discrimination and abuse and I'm mindful of that. To me it would be the same as naming something christianlist and muslimlist to denote "good" and "bad", maybe that's a better example.
At the end of the day I think my approach is not making the world any worse and possible might even make it infinitesimally better. But you do you, I have no problem with that.
I think the fundamental issue is that you think there is some link between racism and the fact that the word "black" is commonly associated with bad things.
People aren't racist towards black people because of the word black. (You might have noticed that non-black people can be victims of racism too!)
And "black" isn't associated with badness because of racism against black people either.
And it isn't even the black community calling for this. It's white SJWs. Ok I think they probably do have good intentions but they also want low-effort feel-good actions and don't really care what effect they actually have.
It's the "set your profile picture" of racism. The only effect is making people who do it feel like they've done something worthwhile.
> To me it would be the same as naming something christianlist and muslimlist to denote "good" and "bad", maybe that's a better example.
Terrible analogy. There's a fundamental difference between "blacklist" and "darkielist" (for example). Black doesn't just mean "black people". It is also just a colour.
> And it isn't even the black community calling for this. It's white SJWs. Ok I think they probably do have good intentions but they also want low-effort feel-good actions and don't really care what effect they actually have.
> The only effect is making people who do it feel like they've done something worthwhile.
I feel like you're discrediting your point a little bit with this by labeling people with that term and assuming something about what "they" want or think.
this is pedantic as hell. if you are going to be so pedantic, then i ask you: should we be calling black people "black". that is not even close to an accurate description of their skin color.
Except that there are no other interpretations of the words "christian" and "muslim", where it's quite clear you're referring to specific religions.
Black and white are colors. _You_ are making the leap from color to ethnicity.
At the end you claim you "have no problem with that", and yet you're all over this discussion proclaiming the same weak argument. Seems like you have quite a problem with it.
> Black and white are colors. _You_ are making the leap from color to ethnicity.
Except that we're not living in a hypothetical bubble but a world where white and black make many people think of skin color, I feel like it's hard to deny that at least in NA.
>but a world where white and black make many people think of skin color, I feel like it's hard to deny that at least in NA.
Don't project your neurotic racist thoughts onto others. Not everyone is as racist and neurotic as this. You're poorly attempting to gas light everyone into thinking this neurotically. Stop it.
Trying to control other people's language makes them resentful and annoyed by the cause, especially when they very obviously have no ill intent. This does in fact make the world a worse place.
Yeah, you'll constantly see people use the same old tired jokes here with like 10K karma. I guess it's what this community goes for. Hence why it's started being referred to as "the orange site" and not by name, people don't want to associate themselves with a bunch of borderline racists.
At first I thought he was just misinformed and tried to politely correct them, but now I see that they really just try to provoke people and using arguments of similar structures to the ones caring so much about displaying the Confederate Flag "because it's part of their American history".
Yes, obviously because I disagree with your word banning I must be one of those confederate flag waving rednecks.
It would be impossible for me to be a lifelong liberal voter with a track record of donating to liberal causes, a certificate in LGBTQ studies and a history of activism on a variety of issues.
Sensible people can have sensible disagreements. Jumping to insulting people who disagree with you and tarring them is poor form and reflects badly on your position.
Not "must" but bayesian statistics would argue it likely. Just as it would be highly unusual for somebody who generally supports progressive social ideas to loudly oppose language changes which are generally agreed to be anti-racist. If you do fall into this tiny minority, it would be fascinating to understand how you justify this apparent dissonance.
You keep spreading false facts and when disproved, just jump on to false logic:
You're claiming I'm insulting you, but how? By pointing out the fact that much like people who'd argue it's fine to display the confederate flag because it's large part of american history regardless of the bad things associated with it or how it makes black people feel?
Are you insulted by comparison of argument structure?
Good, perhaps that'll help you see how black people might feel when they're faced with people like you, who insist on using terms that would have never coined if black people weren't an underrepresented minority in the software industry.
Hacker news is filled with self obsessed tech bros who pretend they are "libertarian" but are actually just racists. Look at this entire thread about pedantic rambling about a single word. Blacklist -> blocklist is not censorship, some random slippery slope fallacy, the end of civilisation etc. It's such a non issue just to change it to make some people happier there should not be thousands of racist comments about it. Maybe you don't notice if you only stick to technical topics, but as soon as it becomes something cultural its a clusterfuck.
News organizations are low quality by default. Their bussiness model is creating multiple articles per day and make it sound interesting, sometimes more interesting than what really happened. This so they can maximize viewer retention and therefore maximize ad-revenue. It's not really a recipe where you'll find the most accurate truth.
You can still read their websites for information, but when you google, those news website tend to fill up the first 3 pages of your results and often you find better information once you get past those websites. e.g. independant journalist blog sites or scientific papers, etc...
I also like to search back in time. e.g. when you want to learn about coronavirusses, it's better to search before january 2020. Else your results get filled with articles from journalist that never even heard of corona virusses before they wrote their article.
I dont really read news anymore. But i think forbes was a decent one. I havent checked in a while though.
edit: i'd say hackernews is a good way know about things. much variety.
edit2: news is not really that important to begin with. It's just about what's happening in the world. It's not that important to know that. You rather want to fill up your brain with information about engineering, science, nature, etc. You know.. information that you can "USE". That's why it's "useful".
With google you can search with type:pdf so that you filter in scientific papers.
I'd also suggest that the phrase 'correct information' does suggest you already know what you believe you're looking for (otherwise how would you know what you're reading is incorrect?).
For me I'd just like to hear a story and any relevant details. But the news orgs usually take a small bit of information and the rest is their opinion and extrapolation without much evidence. You know because sometimes they will reach a "verdict" which is opposite what the judge and jury reach after days of reviewing all of the evidence. I've realized it's up to me to find all the info, and try my best to determine the truth, which sometimes is quite literally impossible.
I try to be sympathetic to the "color blind is still racist" thing, since I'm white so maybe my perspective's not that useful.
But I definitely feel a lot more racist and way more race-aware, to no productive purpose and in contexts where it can't possibly matter, than I did 20 years ago, as a result of this stuff. My kids are way more race-aware than I was at their ages, as a result, too. I sure hope whatever good is coming of this is worth it. I don't like it a bit.
You're not the only one, but most people think you're being ridiculous. It has nothing to do with black and white people any more than blackmail does. Or... should that be extortmail?
Same nonsense as the Git `master` panty-twist. Though at least `main` is a real word that makes sense and doesn't make me cringe.
You seem to copy and paste this fake fact about 'King Henry's Little Black Book"' all over the thread.
> Blacklist comes from King Henry's "Little Black Book" which was a list of his political enemies.
While the term Blacklist does not originate from colonialism, it seems to have first been used in the 1639 tragedy "The Unnatural Combat" by Philip Massinger.
Not only did I not find any evidences supporting your fun "fact" about "King Henry and his enemies", the name Henry was quite popular as far as kings go, but non of them even lived in the 17th century according to this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rulers_named_Henry
Back to the term - while blacklist _origin_ has nothing to do with racism, it's counterpart, "white list" was first used in the mid 19th century (not sure where it was first used exactly) - while the people who made these terms popular in the 20th century perhaps were not racist, they also were also did not think about how black people would feel about labeling white with "allow" and black with "reject", and I while I can't hold it against them since it might have been different times, the fact that some people are trying so hard to keep using these words, despite being triggering toward some people is hard for me to understand without making cynical assumptions about their motives.
That particular framing only has "power" if we give it. Once you open that can of worms, you will struggle to put it back. Next up we get white, yellow and red. Take all the words out there that use those and imagine what chaos and hatred it'll cause when we start trying to accommodate everyone.
>This might not even have racist origins, but it does reinforce racist ideals
fear of the dark equally fits this profile. is that offensive?
>why randomly call it a black list if you're not appealing to this culture?
do you think the author asked himself: "how can I import a harmful cultural theme into my work today?"
or could it be that blacklist and whitelist are the common usage terms for lists of disallowed and allowed members of a group?
No I think it was a cognitive bias, why are you importing blame?
People who so vehemently defend calling something a blacklist instead of a blocklist are very suspicious to me. Similar energy to defending calling a woman female.
I wrote out a full reply to what you said, but I started to realise that I don't believe that you're being ingenuous. My gut feeling is this is a false flag operation to turn people [vehemently] against the very real cause of fighting racism and social injustice, or just a bad joke, or both
> black means evil and white means divine in popular culture, in video games, etc. Angels are white and demons are black.
It's not nearly as black and white (/pun) as you portray. Black is also symbolic of ultimate luxury and sophistication (black limo, black tux, AMEX Black Card, etc.). Nor is white universally considered a good thing either (e.g. whitewashing a bad situation).
> I _never_ hear anyone call it a black limo, or a black tux, though they are usually black, they are not referred to as black.
I was responding to your blanket assertion that "black means evil and white means divine in popular culture", which is clearly not true as I've illustrated. Colors have various connotations depending on the context, you have simply latched on to one context and want to apply it everywhere to fit your argument. The fact that AMEX chose to brand their ultra-exclusive card as AMEX Black is telling. Clearly, AMEX thinks you are going to associate their card's name with luxury and exclusivity, and aren't going to associate their card with evil.
Edit: Accidentally quoted the grandparent instead of the parent.
How about we stop using colors to categorize human beings? If it offensive to call Chinese people yellow or Aboriginal people red then we should stop calling other people white, black, or brown.
It's not gaslighting at all, the point is that the origin of the name comes from culture not from description. Without the culture backing up the name it would be random, you're getting your order of operations wrong.
Ah, the good old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis linguistic theory. I'm not a fan.
> I think words have a lot of power.
They do, as symbols, as tools. That's why they're fundamental to civilization. They allow thoughts to stay. However, they don't control people. IMHO people are pretty recalcitrant and more powerful than words.
I agree for the simple statement that blacklist and whitelist are not really descriptors but historical terms crafted by some weirdos in the 1600s.
Blocklist and Passlist seem to carry the same number of syllables. So, seems like decent replacements. (Allowlist is a better term but multiple syllables is annoying)
You’re not the only one, but I prefer “blacklist” as it’s indicative of black holes and darkness and badness. So it fits with bad sites I want to block.
Of course my favorite color is black so I’m ok with using terms with different contexts and would condemn anyone trying to associate the negative associations of the color with populations that have dark skin color or use the label “Black.”
No it's not. List of filesystem blocks? List of block devices?
Or use blacklist, a word that has a definition that predates modern computing and non-English speakers can quickly translate using any old translator, dictionary, etc.
Wow, while I can perhaps understand perhaps why the repository owner, given that he's not from the US (according to his Github) and lacking the historical background, could think that the fact that closing the issue with the comment "I don't want to touch this controversial issue" might actually be a neutral approach (it's not, he touched the issue when he chose the name in 2018, perhaps later if he heard about twitter and other companies explicitly choosing not to use this term anymore and finally now, when he had a chance to explain his possible blind spot, but instead chose to look aside).
That I can (maybe) understand, but every other commenter is intentionally toxic in a way I've never on open source projects.
> I think you might be the one lacking the historical background. Blacklist comes from King Henry and his list of political enemies.
1. You seem to assume that historical background is synonymous with "words first origin". By historical background I meant to refer to not being fully aware of just how much racism toward black Americans was and is still present everywhere. I say so as a non-American myself. It's not present in your every day, one cannot fully grasp it.
2. While the term Blacklist does not originate from colonialism, it seems to have first been used in the 1639 tragedy "The Unnatural Combat" by Philip Massinger.
3. Not only did I not find any evidences supporting your fun "fact" about "King Henry and his enemies", the name Henry was quite popular as far as kings go, but non of them even lived in the 17th century according to this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rulers_named_Henry
4. Back to the term - while blacklist _origin_ has nothing to do with racism, it's counterpart, "white list" was first used in the mid 19th century (not sure where it was first used exactly) - while the people who made these terms popular in the 20th century perhaps were not racist, they also were also did not think about how black people would feel about labeling white with "allow" and black with "reject", and I while I can't hold it against them since it might have been different times, the fact that some people are trying so hard to keep using these words, despite being triggering toward some people is hard for me to understand without making cynical assumptions about their motives.
> I find realpoliticking innocous words to be toxic and problematic.
While I'm not sure what Realpolitik has to do with any of it, but your issues with it, whether justified or not, do not make the comments on that issue any less toxic.
Forgive me but instead of bouncing between threads I'm just going to condense to this one.
Yes, racism is real. Racism has been a part of history. Racism still exists today.
What does the word "Blacklist" have to do with that? It's not about black people, it's not suggesting we should do anything to black people. We can all agree there are racist words - but why is "blacklist" one of them?
Is "blacklight" a racist term?
"Yellow" means caution or slow in most contexts. It's the color of safety vests and caution signs. Should Asians take offense? What about native peoples with the color "Red"?
This blacklist (and "master") nonsense is based on a fake story about the term that doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and the idea that Black people may have negative feelings to this fake story. I believe the term here is "the racism of soft expectations".
You can't create a lie and then demand conformance to that lie because "you may upset someone". Atheists were persecuted for a long time in history (as were many smaller religious groups) because they were considered "offensive".
The word policing goal is simple - it's control. Language gives the means of expression and to restrict language is to restrict expression. The word banning will not stop - "blacklist", "master", "brown bag", "black belt", "assault", "war". All of those have been banned by one of these lists - and it has nothing to do with helping any race.
> it's not suggesting we should do anything to black people
Should I provide you with a list of racial slurs that do not suggest to do something to a minority?
> "Yellow" means caution or slow in most contexts. It's the color of safety vests and caution signs. Should Asians take offense? What about native peoples
I'm sure you can educate yourself with the reasons why semaphores are colored the way they are. Such reasoning do not hold for blacklist and whitelist.
Also you do realize that Asian people and Native Americans do not identify as Yellow or Red, right?
Black people do identify as such, and labeling white and black as allow/reject would have never made so popular if black people weren't so under represented in the software industry in the first place, so yes, lack of inclusion in the first place is the racial influence that allowed these terms to become popular in the software industry, and now that people are trying to change that with a better term. Again, language is a dynamic thing, embrace that.
I don't blame white men for introducing these terms early into software development. One cannot be fully aware of the weight their words carry, but language is a dynamic creature, and should adapt for all kind of reason.
You have a group that you want to include and is affected by a term that's triggering for them, there is an alternative that's just as short and pass it's meaning better (allow-list, reject-list), and sill you seem to argue against replacing it with nothing but "it's original usage was not racial"
> This blacklist (and "master") nonsense is based on a fake story about the term that doesn't hold up under scrutiny
The only fake story so far is your story about "King Henry and his enemies".
You're doing a great effort to enforce terms that have no advantage in terms of semantics and clear disadvantages when it comes to inclusion, but now that I see that you'd support even terms such as master/slave it's quite clear you don't really care about the historical background at all.
> Atheists were persecuted for a long time in history (as were many smaller religious groups) because they were considered "offensive".
Dude, you're comparing persecution of minorities (atheist) due to who they are and their beliefs to... replacing one term for another so that you can make a minority group feel more included.
> You can't create a lie and then demand conformance to that lie
How is "King Henry and his enemies"? I'm still waiting to hear a better version of the story, surely you didn't just say that I'm "the one lacking the historical background" for no reason, did you?
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