Ask HN: What sites, e.g. experts-exchange.com, would you remove from Google?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=701656

by epi0Bauqu • 17 years ago

12 38 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In Google's results, what useless sites do you notice coming up again and again?

compay2• 17 years ago

Here in Argentina, if you search in Spanish, todoar.com.ar comes up in the top 10 for almost everything. I'll hand it to the owners, they know how to do SEO. The problem is there's no useful content on any of their ad-ridden pages.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

All the stores that have been spidered (amazon.com etc)

Googles own sites (youtube.com, images.google.com, etc)

All the cloaked sites (sites that will redirect you after landing, or that show you different content than they showed the search engine)

All the spammers (you've already mentioned experts xchg, but there are many many more)

Anything that points to or contains the word sedoparking

All the crappy blogs

I'm sure that google could do with several billion pages less than they index right now and their quality would shoot up.

JshWright2• 17 years ago

I would argue that indexing a bunch of crap actually _improves_ the quality of Google's search.

Just like trying to filter e-mail spam, the larger your spam corpus, the easier it is to differentiate between valid content and junk.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

If they did a better job on the differentiation then I would agree with you.

petercooper2• 17 years ago

All the stores that have been spidered (amazon.com etc) Googles own sites (youtube.com, images.google.com, etc)

I'm glad this is a hypothetical question because I find both of the above very useful. I often suffix "amazon" or "youtube" on to a search - saves me actually having to go to those sites to perform a search in most cases.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

site:amazon.com

that works just fine and it would keep the rest of the search results clean.

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

mahalo

timcederman2• 17 years ago

and WikiAnswers (aka a huge number of seed questions and no answers).

AhmadH• 17 years ago

about.com

KWD2• 17 years ago

I actually find About.com useful at times. However, an About.com site that is no more than a spam site is Consumer Search. Sad that such a site is owned by the NY Times.

skolor• 17 years ago

Its funny you mention experts-exchange. Whenever I see that as a search result, its usually a relief. I have yet to see an experts-exchange page that did not have the information I was looking for on it, even though they do make it rather difficult to find (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the actual answer).

Compared to the huge number of real spam sites that usually come up when search for technology related questions, like all of those mailing-list archives/mirrors, and the huge number of pages that ripped old forum content, experts-exchange is amazing.

I can't really think of any pages I would want removed. I would like to see better pages for a lot of products, but that seems to have more to do with the manufacturers simply not creating the pages than with Google. Search results for physical goods seem to be fairly lacking, its always hard to find information about them and not just stores selling them.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

I think a lot of people don't realize the answers are at the bottom, so they click on the link, see the request to register/pay to see the posts, and immediately back up, cursing the pseudo-paywall.

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

I've seen people say this before - how do you mean "at the bottom". Every page I have seen highlights the "accepted answer" in green and does ask you to pay to access it..... am I missing a workaround?

ErrantX4• 17 years ago

The thing with experts exchange is you have to pay to see the answers, right? (unless I have missed something).

Because they are all over google for most error related searches it is frustrating to click without looking and find a useless page (taunting you almost :P). It hides all the free useful pages with the same answers on :(

I wouldnt remove it from Google though - and I agree, it is better than all the spam link sites.

astrodust• 17 years ago

It implies that you need to pay to see the answers even though they are presented there on the page. The first block of "answers" is deliberately mangled to imply you need to pay to see them, and then there is a block of advertisements, but below that is the same answers presented in plain text.

Very shifty indeed.

rksprst• 17 years ago

I have an account there that I created years ago, and just login if I want to read an answer. I never paid for anything on the site.

It used to be free to register, so unless they've changed something, all you need to do is create an account.

timcederman2• 17 years ago

You only need to sign in if you are NOT referred by Google.

KWD2• 17 years ago

I've often thought that if you removed any site that uses Google Adsense you'd get much better results.

JshWright2• 17 years ago

Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to whip up an extension (or just a greasemonkey script) to append "-site:blah.com" entries to all google searches, according to a user defined list.

In fact, I'd be surprised if such an extension didn't already exist (I'm not interested enough to go look...)

devicenull• 17 years ago

The "Customize Google" extension does this

pert• 17 years ago

The price comparison sites that don't contain reviews but do manage to come high up in a Google search for 'X reviews'.

Mankhool• 17 years ago

If Google won't filter the garbage out of the results why doesn't someone build something that will, for example, instantly remove any webpage that hasn't been updated since 1999 etc.etc. Off topic yes, but I find most of the sites that come up, well, useless.

viraptor• 17 years ago

swik.net - For some reason I see it's "search" pages every day in search results. Put two protocol names together, or a language + protocol and you're almost guaranteed to get it in the second place :/

scribd - They hide your search phrases somewhere in the page, so that you can think you've found exactly what you were looking for. But all you get is some random, slightly related book that doesn't help you at all.

prakash• 17 years ago

1. Sites which are useless for everyone e.g.: splogs, etc.

2. Some sites could be useful for a few, while being completely useless for the rest i.e. letting users remove certain sites from their results only

3. Like the ad-block software, people could subscribe to well-defined popular lists to get started.

4. I would also segment by verticals. E.g.:when you do a people search, you could bucket results into:

a.) sites where the user, him/her self has entered the info - linkedin, facebook type websites

b.) sites where a community has created a profile - wikipedia

c.) sites that inteliigently crawl other sites and present the info -- lead411 , pipl, zoominfo, spoke, etc are useless to me

bhseo2• 17 years ago

I have been compiling a list of useless sites to share with the world. You will need CustomizeGoogle for Firefox or your own userscript in the browser of your choice. Come to think of it, I might even create some userscripts/plugins for other browsers to go with my useless website list.

If you'd like to contribute your own lists or userscripts, let me know.

bhseo2• 17 years ago

Here is an example from my list, I call this the "site info" category.

http://*.aboutus.org/* http://www.quantcast.com/* http://www.websiteoutlook.com/* http://www.xomreviews.com/* http://www.statbrain.com/* http://www.alexa.com/data/* http://searchanalytics.compete.com/* http://builtwith.com/?* http://*.compete.com/* http://www.who.is/*

jusob• 17 years ago

All my competitors :-)

kingsley_20• 17 years ago

I would not do that :-)

scumola• 17 years ago

I have my own 'custom' search engine that filters out those annoying sites. You can use it here: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015394218516616598090:kmqd...

hdx• 17 years ago

I wish I had known the experts-exchange "hack" before...

udfalkso• 17 years ago

I actually wrote myself a greasemonkey script to hide results from w3schools once upon a time. I'll try to dig it up.

Their docs are almost always missing the one piece of information I actually want (usually a function definition) and they nearly always rank very highly for such queries.

Ask HN: What sites, e.g. experts-exchange.com, would you remove from Google?

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