When you search the web for solutions to a potential PC problem, after coming to Raymond.cc of course, it can be very frustrating typing in your search keywords and a large amount of the results are unrelated or coming from a few websites that provide little or no help at all. Wouldn’t it be useful to get rid of those useless results and actually show just the ones that could really help? There are numerous plug-ins and add-ons for various browsers, but if you have use of more than one machine, those plug-ins have to be installed on all of them, fast desktop or slow netbook. Wouldn’t it be easier to block them at the search engine level so you get the same results on any browser and any machine?
If you have a Google account, there’s a useful feature which has sadly been slightly hidden away and is easy to miss called ‘Managed Blocked Sites’ which does exactly that; create a list of websites that will be blocked from the Google search results.
Sign into your Google account and click on the following link: Manage Block Sites
Alternatively, sign in to your Google account, if you’re not already there, select iGoogle in the bottom left, go to the options cog wheel (top right) and select ‘Search settings’.
Once on the settings page, look down towards the bottom for this:
Click on the block unwanted sites link and you will be presented with the ‘Manage Blocked Sites’ screen:
As you can see, a total of 500 sites can be blocked and the process of adding a site to the list is very easy. Enter the address in the box and click ‘Block site’. Simple!
If you enter a lot of sites, it is recommended to click ‘Download as text file’ and save the list to your computer for future use. To remove a site from the list, simply use ‘Unblock’ or ‘Unblock all’. The next time you perform a search and one of your blocked sites would have appeared in the results, you will see something similar to this at the bottom of the page:
From now on, your searches should produce a lot more relevant results and will hopefully save you some time and frustration. As this is an account setting in Google the block list will follow you to whichever computer you log in to your account with.
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