Remove Spam From Search Engines
If you are Googling for something but aren’t interested in seeing numerous affiliate sites focusing on purchasing products you may want to take a look at Give me Back My Google (GMBMG). The site was written by Oliver Humpage from the UK and proves fish and chips can be an extremely inspirational combination of protein and carbohydrates (I am sure the vinegar doesn’t hurt either).
Any site which is purely a comparison site, with no extra useful information gets removed from search results.
Now you can take this site as just a niche search engine companion but what if there are many others who decide to take search engine results and alter them in various ways to achieve desired results. You could have a filter that just gives you negative results – such as lawsuits and Better Business Bureau database entries. How about another filter for just good news – positive earnings, etc.
I smell a new API opportunity for Google in fact. And how about personalized filters with government sites and Wikipedia stripped out?
You see where this is heading? Every time I search I look into a vast valley of information that may have tons of information of no interest to me. What if there was a way to narrow down results based on topic and perspective. This would allow me to quickly dissect the haystack and instantaneously find not only the needle but the family of needles, pins, and other microscopic bits of information search engines are still hopeless at providing us.
Much of my appreciation for search engines by the way has come from John Battelle’s book The Search and his excellent Seachblog – particularly this entry on Give Me Back My Google.
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Based on Google's custom search I've created a search engine which filters out the most "popular" price comparison websites, online shops, otherwise highly commercial sites and spam or sites with spam alike content. I think it works a bit better than the "Give Me Back My Google" fix because the list of blocked sites is far more comprehensive. Please have a try at http://www.cleversearch.org
In case you still find annoying websites in the search results just send them to me (link to the contact form is in the footer) and I'll add them to the filter list.