Gregory's ServerYes it is and it’s so very sad to see some of the bigger lot now also just chasing Google for clicks.
Even just searching Steam Deck on Google constantly brings up spam blogs.
I will continue doing this as long as people want it 🫡
 17 comments
@gamingonlinux Wouldn't make a difference. You block one spam site, 5 more clones with the exact same content pop up in its place. Google makes money off the ads running there, so they won't care. The more spam sites listed higher on the page, the more money they make. @gamingonlinux What could be interesting would be an extension which hides sites in search listings with adverts enabled. Not just blocking ads, but blocking/hiding any site which even HAS them, (with the idea that they'll be more likely to do shady things to get ad revenue). I would install that RIGHT NOW, as even with duckduckgo, clicking through to a BS ad site is just depressing.
[DATA EXPUNGED]
@gamingonlinux you can with this and uBlock Origin, https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results @gamingonlinux there is a browser extension for that, on all browsers https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist It even supports downloading blocklists from URLs in its configuration, although I didn’t find many good ones @gamingonlinux one of the reasons I've been paying for Kagi search for the past months (aside from theoretically no data harvesting and advertising) is that I can prioritize/deprioritize results from specific domains, and block spammy ones altogether. And because I'm logged into an account, those preferences stay across all devices. Of course there's a lot that's uncomfortable about paying for search, so still considering it an ongoing experiment! Sorry, meant to say this yesterday, but thanks for the heads up on Half Life MMod, it's good fun. @gamingonlinux @gamingonlinux I hate those bot articles. They’re always like “Fortnite x Overwatch Crossover IMMINENT” and then it’ll be talking about an unrelated survey mentioning the two games while 2/3rds of the article is a plagiarized Wikipedia article explaining what the games are. @gamingonlinux I'm genuinely unsure what will happen when 99% of the results are GPT-generated rehashes rewritten with a prompt to reword for SEO ranking for term x and y. The signal to noise ratio will be orders of magnitude lower.  @gamingonlinux That drove me away from writing about games. The beginning of the end was when we started grading every article automatically on SEO. It was completely contrary to my writing style.  @gamingonlinux #Kagi lets you do that, you can either downrank individual sites or block them entirely. I just wish it was cheaper. @gamingonlinux It's not just SEO, it's fucking everywhere. Before I started purging them, my Facebook feed was absolutely clogged with Ranker links. I still see them every once in a while! How many Facebook pages does Ranker even own?! |
I give you one of the offenders. I wish i could just entirely block sites on search engines.