Since a very public backlash began over the allegedly decreasingly quality of Google’s search results a few months ago, the search giant has made some very public moves to restore confidence in their ubiquitous service. The Big G published a detailed blog post about how they continually evolve their algorithm to provide the best results, and then, as if to prove their point, launched a huge change that penalised certain sites Google believes to be “low quality”, such as content farms.
The so-called “Panda” update caused such a huge swing in some page’s rankings that a few companies, for example how-to site Mahalo, had to jettison some staff almost immediately. Although the anti-Google noise has mainly been coming from a vocal minority within the tech community, the good folks from Mountain View seem determined to prove their detractors wrong, and today have launched yet another crap-fighting tool – Blocked Sites.
Using the new functionality users can selectively ban domains from their search results, using a new “Block all results” button, which will sit alongside the “Cached” and “Similar” buttons we are all used to seeing. We can’t see this feature having much everyday functionality, given that it’s hard to judge the content of an entire site based on one search result, however it may come in handy if, for example, you want to eject a particular online store you dislike from your product searches.
Interestingly, Google say they are open to using the blocked sites data as a signal when determining search rankings in the future – meaning a site which is frequently blocked would see its rankings decrease as a result – although they’re not implementing this for now.
You will be able to manage your blocked sites via a menu at the bottom of your results should you have a change of heart about a certain domain.
