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.
I don’t host an instance but I would definitely block userbenchmark
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=RQSBj2LKkWg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Reddit. I blocked the domain when the blackout started and haven’t been back.
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.
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.
The kagi search engine allows you block sites, they have a leader board of what the tops ones are here: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard pintrest is getting a fucking.
Aww, alternativeto.net isn’t that bad…
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.
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.
