Firefox 4 final is out now. Sadly it breaks the Greasemonkey script Google Noise Reduction, which was an excellent per-domain results blocker for Google Search.
However, the new and powerful Google Hit Hider does work very well, and is very similar. It’s obviously learned a lot from earlier software like Blocksite, Surfclarity, and Noise Reduction (all of which no longer work with FF4 / the latest Google) and there are some nice refinements. Not the least of which is very easy import/export as simple plain-text lists of URLs.
It’s a fairly simple process to get your hand-crafted Noise Reduction blocklist out of Firefox and into Google Hit Hider…
1. In Firefox’s address bar, type: about:config
2. Scroll down to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist You’ll see…
({‘britannia.com’:true, ‘oxfordjournals.org’:true, ‘tandf.co.uk’:true, ‘ingentaconnect.com’:true, ‘sagepub.com’:true, ‘myspace.com’:true, ‘experts-exchange.com’:true})
3. Double click on the line of banned URLs you’ll find there, and copy them to Notepad.
4. Now just top-and-tail the list, then search and replace until you have a clean list, but leave each URL separated by a single comma. Save the list as a .csv (comma separated value) file, then open that with MS Office’s Excel (or whatever the free Open Office equivalent is). The list should load up with one URL per cell.
5. Now just copy and paste the resulting cleaned list into: Manage Hiding / List Util / ‘Perma-ban list’ in Google Hit Hider.
The advantage of this over the now-native Google blocking is that: i) it lets you break the 500 URL limit; ii) you can block domains en-masse rather than one at a time; and iii) it lets you easily import/export the blocklist, in order to share with colleagues etc.
Hi JURN, Step #4 in your post inspired me to improve the Import feature to handle this format directly. Naturally, there may be variations I didn’t anticipate, but hopefully it will save your readers time in moving their lists.