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If I see another search result from eHow I’m going to cry.

by Carlyn Maw on January 27, 2011, no comments

So this is how to exclude certain sites from Google searches.

I don’t like eHow.com. I don’t like About.com  They irritate me. Personal pet peeve. And don’t even get me started on Associated Content, Yahoo! Answers, Etc.  Where misinformation goes to breed.

I could avoid seeing them by starting my search from somewhere other than a search engine, somewhere like delicious.com (sigh) or pinboard.in or wherever real people will have had to bother to tag the pages.  Or even by starting at Wikipedia.com, where at least if someone is wrong on the internet it can be addressed.

But I like Google, so I keep going back. I could turn on Google History and only search where I’ve been before, but I think it’s a little creepy, and it doesn’t help me if I need inforamtion that is beyond my ken.

So I created my own custom search engine on google

  1. Went to http://www.google.com/coop/cse/, followed the steps (you have to create a search with a limited reach first, pick any random website). 
  2. Then went to the new CSE’s “control panel” and at the bottom of the “Basics” page is the option to search the whole web still. 
    Screen_shot_2011-01-26_at_5
  3. Then on the “sites” page is where you can add websites to exclude. In bulk.

The result:

I put it on my iGoogle page.  It promotes sites like instructables.com, lifehacker.com, the LA Times, The Mayo Clinic , etc.  and excludes sites like, about.com, answers.yahoo.com ehow.com and associatedcontent.com

    Use it. It’ll make me money, I think?