Filtering the Google

May 2, 2004 4:07 PM

Is there a way on Google to have it exclude shopping sites from a search? If I search on a book or movie title, or hotel name, most of the results are just generic sales pages and not very informative. Willing to use a different search engine if I can get the desired results.
posted by billsaysthis to computers & internet (6 comments total)

You can always exclude words, like "buy" and "amazon". Just put a minus sign in front of them...
posted by trharlan at 4:12 PM on May 2, 2004

I find that excluding "shipping", "cart" or "checkout" often clears out many shopping links.

(i.e. search for product name -shipping -cart -checkout or some subcombination of those terms)
posted by j.edwards at 4:54 PM on May 2, 2004

any Mozilla / FireFox experts out there riggd up a variation on the search box to do this automatically?
posted by Space Coyote at 5:04 PM on May 2, 2004

You can use the 'site:xyz.com' feature to filter out certain domains, ie '-site:amazon.com books' would show me results for the word "books" which do not originate from amazon.com.
posted by mmcg at 5:15 PM on May 2, 2004

If you want access via a form, try this out.

I don't know how the search box works with FireFox on platforms other than OS X, but here is the modified code inside my google.src file.
posted by the biscuit man at 9:26 PM on May 2, 2004

Space Coyote,

You can use this URL for quick searches. (Tweak the '+' separated list of words to your own desire)

right click to grab the long URL

You can also tweak your own quick search query by going to Advanced Search, selecting your options and searching for %s.

Make a book mark of the resulting URL and then edit it's properties. Where it says keywords, choose an easy to remember word like 'noshop'.

Now to use this as a quicksearch, type in your address bar, where the URL goes, 'noshop "sony television"'.

As far as making a plugin to use the Firebird or Mozilla search box, that seems like an awful lot of work to duplicate a quicksearch. However, if you find the search box useful and are comfortable with editing the .src file, the biscuit man has an easy to read example. See this page for more info, if necessary:

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/deepdocs.html

The problem with any query like this though is going to be some of the words you remove may be related to what you are searching for in some way you didn't expect. Additionally, by adding a number of words to remove from search results, you limit the number of words you can search for.
posted by sequential at 9:45 PM on May 2, 2004