The Internet has made the life of a professional developer much less frustrating in many ways, but the most important is that we are rarely alone when we face a weird problem. The chances are nearly 100% that someone else out there has had the same problem and posted about it somewhere. The answer is often a Google search away.

Recently, though, Google has been losing the battle against content farms such as eFreedom, ComAnswer, Developer IT, QuestionHub and DevComments. For developers, the worst of these are sites that duplicate Stack Overflow’s questions and answers. Google sometimes inexplicably ranks these sites higher than the original page on Stack Overflow itself.

Search Bleach is an extension for Safari, Chrome and Firefox that solves this problem by simply removing the problem sites from Google search result pages.

Caveat: Search Bleach does not currently work when Google Instant is on. The extensions run at page load and Instant uses Ajax to update the results. I have not yet researched if it is possible to hook into the update and remove unwanted domains.

Download the extension for Safari, Chrome or Firefox and your browser will prompt you to install it.

This extension is open source and the code is available at GitHub.