Browser Extension of the Week: Personal Blocklist

Posted 12/01/2011 at 11:44am | by Seamus Bellamy

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Thank the internet gods for search engines. Without tools like bing, Google or blekko, no one would stand a chance of finding anything online. Prompted by just a few keystrokes, their powerful blend of math, ingenuity, and unicorn tears bring the world to our doorsteps. Unfortunately, search engines are so good at their jobs that they sometimes bring us way more of the world than we want them to. Thanks to content farms, reblogging, and other search result padding endeavors, it’s getting more difficult by the day to locate the information that you’re after. To solve this issue, you can dust off those Boolean skills of yours and input a set of search parameters as long as your arm, or if you’re a Google Chrome user, you can install Personal Blocklist, our Browser Extension of the Week.

Personal Blocklist allows Chrome users to create a personalized blocklist of search results from specific domains. Residing quietly under your browser’s hood, the extension only shows itself once your search’s results have been returned to you. See a return that you’d rather not stumble across again? Simply click the “Block” link to ensure that your target domain is excluded from future search queries.

Unfortunately, at the time that this story was written, Personal Blocklist only worked when searches were conducted using Google. Whether or not Google will opt to allow Yahoo, bing or any other search engines to access the extension remains to be seen.

Be sure to check back next week for another edition of Browser Extension of the week.