It can really get annoying at times, even when searching with Google, to find that a lot of the websites you’ll find at the top of your results are pretty much garbage. Maybe you don’t like a particular website, or maybe it’s simply a useless website, designed to always come out on the top of your search results. Google has been very active in weeding out these “spam” websites, but sometimes they still appear.
Thanks go a handy extension for Google Chrome, called Personal Blacklist, you can manually configure your Googlel search results so that you never see an unwanted website again.
Using Personal Blacklist is amazingly simple. You’ll first want to head over to its entry page at the Google Webstore, located here.
Personal Blocklist is actually an official extension that comes directly from Google, which is nice, as they’re acknowledging the issue. I don’t know if something like this would ever become part of the official Google Search page, so that the extension was redundant, but at this point it doesn’t matter.
Once installed, Personal Blocklist can be used by simply clicking a link. How it works is that when you search Google, you’ll now find a Block This Domain link beside every single search result. Click the link and any result from that domain are immediately (and forever after), removed from your Google search results. It’s that simple. Don’t want a domain to appear? Click the link and it’s gone forever. Or at least until you put it back.
You can manage your blocked domains from the toolbar icon. Simply click the little red icon and a pop-up window appears, showing all your blocked domains. You can unblock them, or edit exactly how the blocking works. For instance, you may want to block a website that comes in different languages, except the one you speak and read. Or whatever. You can block an entire domain, or subdomains you don’t want to see. It’s up to you.
At this point, as mentioned earlier, Personal Blocklist is – at least in my view – a required extension for anyone who gets fed up with what they feel are useless search results. The beauty is that your useless search results aren’t necessarily my search results, and vice versa. With Personal Blocklist, it doesn’t matter. We can each customize our Google search results to our own liking. We can, of course, still browse to those domains (Personal Blocklist doesn’t stop us from visiting those websites, just from them appearing when we search for something), but if we don’t want to see them in our search results, we won’t. I’d hope Google would add this functionality to the standard search engine, but if not, Personal Blocklist is a great addition to anyone’s list of installed extensions for Google Chrome.