Posted in: Desktop software

Google lets users block sites from search results, wishes death to link spam

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I’ve been waiting for this feature for quite a while – Google will allow you to bock whole sites from its search results, starting today. There are browser plug-ins to do that, but now the Big G is building it right into their search pages.

Google is pretty good at finding what I need, but when researching a more obscure topic, most of the results point to the same nasty link spam site that not just gets in the way, but is terribly annoying too…

The feature is starting to roll out today – look for a “Block all example.com results” link next to the Cached and Similar links. After hitting the link, any future searches will exclude the site you blocked.

A notification appears if some search results were excluded because their site is blocked and you can choose to view them. You can manage blocked sites from the settings page.

Google will not use data about which sites are blocked in its page rankings, at least for now. Which is good, since it has a potential to be abused – mass blocking legitimate sites to get them off the first result page, for example.

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