This site automatically strips out a ton of affiliate spam from Google. The results are quite revealing.
How does affiliate spam make it into Google in the first place? Well, not everyone thinks it’s spam. Via Matt Haughey.
Give Me Back My Google
This site automatically strips out a ton of affiliate spam from Google. The results are quite revealing. How does affiliate spam make it into Google in the first place? Well, not everyone thinks it's spam. Via Matt Haughey….
Amazing how easy it is to strip out all that advertising (I mean spam)
some example search terms, please! I’m not seeing any difference with “Motorola Q,” “SLingbox,” others.
Yes, examples, please. I am also not seeing a difference with the infamous 1998 Brin and Page “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” query: “cellular phone”.
My agency runs affiliate programs for several big brand clients and I tested words relevant to all of those clients and saw no real difference. In some cases the GMBMG page returned more results.
It is surprising that this person has to start a whole web-site to simply write a Macro. Just one macro?
Just for everybody’s information, there are hundreds of search macros available with Live Search. You would find a useful one for yourself too!
Further, it is easy to create a search macro without requiring any geeky knowledge. If you can use advanced search feature on google, you can write macros similar to this site, which supposedly is giving you your google back. Microsoft has already given you, your google back!
These macros are easy to share too. They can easily be improved upon by others. No need to suggest back to the original macro writer “please remove or add this site.” Just do it yourself, and take the community credit, aka, browny points for doing it too!
These macros are themselves easily discoverable at http://gallery.live.com (choose Search macro tab on the left column). Or simply search anything on Live Search and open the “more” tab.
Disclaimer: Most of the excitement expressed is due to the commentator’s regular use of Live Search and some excitement is also due to the fact that the commentator is a Microsoft employee.
I tried a bunch of techy type queries and saw no difference. Stuff like iPod, RAZR, etc. In fact RAZR had a ton more hits with the Give Me Back My Google version (though I assume it’s a problem with the counter since under no circumstances should limiting your sources actually provide more hits).
This is just like MySERP.com accept a year and a half late.
and funnily enough the author lives not very far away from us in the South West of the UK. H’m…
I think this simply omits results from a standard set of commercial ecommerce sites that don’t change with the query. Thus as Kamal notes it’s a simple thing and as others note it’ll rarely make a difference unless there are many results from from that very small group of excluded sites.
IMHO it’s just a linkbait site, not an innovation.
That is a very simple and effective way to filter out some unwanted sites. Depending on what you search, you may also filter out important results.
With our meta search engine eTools.ch I experimented with a similar feature, but unfortunately not all search engines allow site exclusions.
More important, I realized that a meta search engine is much more immune to spam hitting a single search engine like Google. For typical search queries, there was not a big difference in the first 10 to 20 results. Therefore we didn’t make this ‘filter’ public and wait until it has to be done in a more elaborate way …
I second that Joe — if you look inside of it, all GmbmG does is to exclude several affiliate sites from the search. For example, looking for the keyword “cheese” will send the following query to Google:
cheese -site:kelkoo. -site:ciao. -site:bizrate. -site:pixmania. -site:dealtime. -site:pricerunner. -site:dooyoo. -site:pricegrabber. -site:pricewatch. -site:shopping.msn.com -site:resellerratings. -site:epinions.com -site:nextag.com -site:buy.com -site:comparestoreprices.co.uk -site:unbeatable.co.uk -site:ebay. -site:shopping.com -site:shopbot.
Well, the exclusion of some specific sites like kelkoo and bizrate does not get rid of the spam or affiliate sites. If Google has the knowledge in filtering out such spam, Google itself should come up with an optional filter to filter out affiliate spam sites.
They did, in November last year ‘Google remove’ demo’d now it’s disappeared.
I didnt see tons of differing results either, maybe I should go back and try again after reading the comments here…
I hardly see any difference in the search results. Well, if Google already had such a tool to kill the spam or affiliate websites, they should made it available under Google products – along with other tools such as Google scholar and Google Code
Sorry, but this is useless for poeple who know to use a search engine.And who decides what is spam ? I dont think thats the way to fight spam. To get better search results the search engines should use a built-in user rating function.
OK, this utterly crap website and solution to the problem got my blood so riled that I have relaunched http://www.MySERP.com as a slicker new 2.0 version using Google COOP as the engine (probably not in the way Google intended). This means no limits on the number of exclusions, more sophisticated filters, plus you can join in as volunteers, so please do.
ps. Andy The results are already manually reviewed by Googles eval team…get over it.