Browser extension lets you remove specific sites from search results

The uBlackList browser extension lets you clean up search results by removing specific sites when searching on Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and other search engines.

While the browser extension is not new, being developed since early 2021, it was recently posted to Y Combinator's Hacker News, so we thought we would take a look at it.

uBlackList is a browser extension for both Chromium and Firefox that allows you to input a list of websites you want to be blocked from search results.

Whether these sites are low quality, are known for misleading information, or you simply have no desire to read their content, uBlackList can prevent them from being displayed on the Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, StartPage, and Yahoo! Japan search engines.

Removing sites from search result pages

To get started with uBlackList, install the browser extension from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons page. Once installed, you can click on the extension's icon and select 'Options' to configure the extension.

From the options screen, you can add the sites you would like to block from search results using regular expressions or match patterns, as shown below.

For example, if you want to remove all pages from example.com and Wikipedia (just an example!) from search results, you could add the following patterns to uBlackList:

*://*.example.com/*
*://*.wikipedia.com/*

Once you click on the Save button and perform a search that returns results from wikipedia.com, you will find that they are no longer displayed, as shown below.

Even more helpful, the extension adds a 'Block this site" link next to URLs shown in search results, easily letting you block sites as you see them.

By default, the extension will only remove search results from Google, but as we said previously, it also supports blocking sites in the Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, StartPage, and Yahoo! Japan search engines.

It's also possible to configure a URL that contains a list of patterns that should be blocked, which will be downloaded and updated regularly.

Finally, you can configure the extension to synchronize your settings across the Google Cloud, allowing you to use the same settings on different browsers that you may use.

I tested the extension throughout the day and found that it did a great job removing sites that I felt were cluttering up search results related to malware removal.

For those who wish to try out uBlackList, you can install it from the Google Chrome Web Store or Mozilla Firefox Add-ons page or download the source from the project's GitHub page.

Browser extension lets you remove specific sites from search results