Announcing Search Bleach

The life of a professional developer became so much easier in the late ’90s. With the Internet at our fingertips, the answer to almost every problem as close as a well-crafted search query.

In the last year, though, Google has been losing ground on content farms. These are sites that duplicate the useful information on other sites, then wrap them with ads and horrible design. Stack Overflow is a frequent victim because the content is extremely useful and also made publicly available. Unfortunately, content farms duplicating this content are even more annoying because their copies aren’t up to date.

Usually, it isn’t much of a problem because the farms rank low in results, but over the last many months, they have outsmarted Google and ended up on page 1, sometimes even outranking the canonical page on Stack Overflow. After I accidentally clicked on those results a few too many times, I decided to create a browser extension that completely removes these farms from Google results so I never see them again. As of today, this extension is available for Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Get it here.