Fed up with all the “Educational” quacking on the DuckDuckGo home-page? You can turn it off via the DuckDuckGo settings…

One of the annoying things that searchers often encounter is a site-blocking overlay, blocking the site just seconds after it loads. Overlays are not just annoying, but are also publicity killers. No experienced Facebook curator, regular blogger and only a few journalists will link to a site that’s not going to give readers the content they were told to expect, as well as annoying the heck out of them within two seconds of arrival. It would be a betrayal of carefully-built trust to send one’s readers to such a broken website.

So all attempts at overlay blockers are welcome, and I was pleased to see the new Behind The Overlay Revival. It’s a forked revival of an older abandoned add-on for the Firefox Web browser. It allows a uniform one-click closure of site-blocking overlays. The only drawback with Behind The Overlay Revival is that it plonks a HUGE icon on your browser task-bar, and will remove something else on the page when you click the button without an overlay present. Without any easy way to Undo. For those reasons I un-installed, but it’s about the only option available and may be what you need.

The equivalent for users of the Chrome browser is the much more polished Poper Blocker. Works as a right-click context menu + select. Option to always remove the overlay on that site. Blacklist option, even.

The other way of doing it in Firefox is via the AdBlock Plus + “Select An Element To Hide” (get that option via the Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus). But that requires that the users manually block each and every element of the overlay, which can take a laborious minute or so since there can be as many as a dozen elements. But these days I’m increasingly just going back to the search results and clicking BLOCK, and never again seeing that site in search results.

See also CSS and desist, for methods of getting to content even on sites with vile blockers such as unherd.com.