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http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/

Google, without affiliate links. (Also skims a lot of aggregator sites)

some time ago I found GMBMG, google the way it used to be, and when I find search results are uselessly bloated with crap, then I turn to this... http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/

Please, PLEASE allow us to check a box in our settings that gets us to the "real" search results, Google.

Name it something innocous, like [] Remember the Good Old Days

In fact, do that now, please - checking the box will remove Expert Sexchange, cnet, pricerunner, etc. etc. from the search "results"

[the list that givemebackmygoogle is a good start for the block list]

If Google uses user comments to affect search, massive attempts would be made by the "search engine optimization" people to game the system. If you thought link farms were bad, phony user farms would be worse. Google won't be able to identify the phonies; they can't even More fundamentally, there's a scaling problem. As I've pointed out before, the number of raters per site has to be large for rating to work. Rating for movies and TV shows works fine. Hotels might get enough ratings to be useful. Joe's Plumbing will be rated only by Joe, Joe's relatives, and Joe's employees.

CustomizeGoogle and GiveMeBackMyGoogle have some good ideas, although GiveMeBackMyGoogle is probably violating Google's terms of service by redistributing Google search results as a web site. Google lets you annotate their search results via their AJAX API, but you're not allowed to add or delete from their results list. If you want to delete items from Google search results, you have to do that via a browser plug-in. (Note, by the way, that Google's Chrome doesn't allow non-Google browser plug-ins. That's a form of DRM, when you think about it.)

With our SiteTruth SiteTruth system, we're addressing the problem by looking at off-web sources of legitimacy. The first question is always "can we find a name and address for the business behind the web site"? We have about four ways to do that. If none of them work, and they're selling something, they get moved down in our search results. If they do have an address, we look them up in various business databases. Considerable data is available about a business, once you can identify it. Ultimately, we want to make the business's credit rating affect their search results. It's necessary to reach out to those hard off-web data sources to separate the real companies from the bottom-feeders. Yes, the "affiliate" crowd will scream. Tough.

As for bottom-feeders, I really like this site, where someone in Brooklyn, NY, took pictures of the storefronts of every Brooklyn photo company he could find that advertised online. It's very funny. Now that's what Google should be doing with StreetView.

Here's our master plan for cleaning up the Web.

The two facilities I'd most like to see on Google are the ability to blacklist domains from my results and to either specifically include or exclude merchants from my results.

For the former givemebackmygoogle is a good start as my pet hate are the price comparison cretins or fleabay who return results for just about anything you enter in the search box. Unfortuntately though whilst givemebackmygoogle is all well and good I'd like to maintain my own blacklist.

For the latter it would take something like Google for there to be enough people to flag sites as merchant sites or not. The reason I'd like this requirement is that merchants tend to get pushed up in Google results so it would be really good to be able to exclude them when I'm simply looking for information. Similarly if I'm trying to buy something I'm only interested in merchant sites as I've already done my research and am not interested in sites that aren't selling anything.

Despite it being rather good it can sometimes be a royal pain in the arse trying to find something via Goggle.

As it is I've written my own custom Google search page in PHP which builds a query string then appends a large "-inurl(name1|name2|name3)" directive on the end of it before calling Google.

But it would be nice to have this facility on Google itself. They should like this sort of thing too as by using a custom blacklist they get all that juicy "this individual likes this sort of stuff" profiling crap that advertisers lust after.

Just my tu'ppence worth.

That in itself makes it a Google killer IMHO, some searches in Google return a dozen pages of the same kelkoo, pricerunner and dooyoo links.

You should try GiveMeBackMyGoogle. It just does google searches, but filters out all the comparison sites from the results. I find it useful for searching for product reviews.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with GMBMG in any way.

http://givemebackmygoogle.com/

Try this

http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/

It's not perfect as you can't customise the block list but it's a start. Even better make your own version to run on localhost so you can have your own block list etc.

This probably does what you want.

http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/

It just negates a whole lot of affliate sites.

This is part of the query it feeds to Google.

-inurl:(kelkoo|bizrate|pixmania|dealtime|pricerunn er|dooyoo|pricegrabber|pricewatch|resellerratings| ebay|shopbot|comparestoreprices|ciao|unbeatable|sh opping|epinions|nextag|buy|bestwebbuys)

Yes.

See also -inurl:(foo|bar|baz) as used to great effect by Give Me Back My Google.

To be fair, this new service is a much better way of going about these things.

You're right; Google has been flooded with crap.

Give givemebackmygoogle.com a try. The site itself is nothing revolutionary since it uses existing Google search options, but it does give you a nice list of spamwords to filter out and include in your Firefox keyword search.

I find that Google is becoming less and less useful.

The web now has become so large that a simple keyword search just doesn't cut it anymore. Try searching for information about a popular digital camera from someone who isn't trying to sell them. It is next to impossible. (Yes I know about http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ - a good try, but not really addressing the fundamental problem.)

The best way that search could get better in my opinion is to introduce some kind of filtering on the type of organisation that produces the pages you are searching for. Google already does a bit of this with Google Scholar. But we need something far more general, and more to the point, a facility for excluding results of particular types, e.g. blogs, sites trying to sell something, ...?

I know that some people will complain that it may be a very subjective judgement whether site X is commercial or not. But search results are never going to be perfect anyway. Let's have the improvements where they are available, and worry about the corner cases later.

This seems a good time to mention http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ as featured in the b3ta newsletter recently. It filters the majority of shopping comparison sites from a google search, it's not perfect but it makes a big difference.