Show HN: Discontent – Extension to combat garbage search engine results (opens in new tab)

(github.com)

8 pointstombds3y ago2 comments

Creator here. In a nutshell this extension is a "Like / Dislike" system but for website results.

I miss the days of things like the YouTube dislike bar, where you can quickly assess if something is good or not.

Currently sitting at ~90 users. To get it off the ground I've scraped the last year of HN to make a set of good links, and used a few content farm blacklists to make a set of bad links. Right now it's semi-useful and should only get better with time.

There are some simple measures in place to prevent spam & abuse, but will cross that bridge if it ever comes.

All feedback welcome!

2 comments

mgsouth3y ago

Very nice idea, good technical discussion in the docs, but it omits one tiny detail: what do the plugins with the returned score? Filter the displayed results?

Edit: Answer is yes, they filter. In Firefox, at least, after installing you see a "Welcome to..." page which says that in the first sentence. And the code makes it clear. (And why does Bing omit wrappers in Chrome???)

tombdsOP3y ago

Thanks for taking a look mate.

Yep you got it, the extension displays the score on the search engine result. I thought about making it filter out all the "bad" results... perhaps in the next version.

And why does bing do it??? I pulled my hair out for a while over that one, it was wreaking a bit of havoc in the tests.

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