google -wikipedia

May 29, 2006 9:36 PM

GoogleFilter: Is there a quick and easy way to eliminate results from Wikipedia and its many mirrors in Google searches?

I am increasingly annoyed by the tons of Wikipedia mirror junk (dozens of copies of the same Wikipedia articles) showing up in my Google results. Has someone worked up some kind of hack that eliminates the growing list of Wikipedia mirrors from search results? Typing -wikipedia just isn't cutting it any more.

posted by gubo to computers & internet (10 comments total)

-"[unusual quote from much-mirrored Wikipedia text]" usually works pretty well.
posted by mediareport at 9:43 PM on May 29, 2006

inurl:-wiki
posted by michaelkuznet at 9:47 PM on May 29, 2006

inurl:-wiki

or if you want other wiki's but not Wikipedia just use:

inurl:-wikipedia
posted by bigmusic at 9:54 PM on May 29, 2006

Thanks for the answers so far. I guess what I'm looking for is not so much commands that might be entered manually, but some kind of script/extension that automatically eliminates wikipedia.org, absoluteastronomy.com, answers.com, and all the other mirrors from any Google search. Is there anything like that out there?
posted by gubo at 10:13 PM on May 29, 2006

I wouldn't be hard to write a Greasemonkey script to filter the Google results, but you would have to build up the list of mirror sites by hand.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 10:40 PM on May 29, 2006

I love recommending Dave's Quick Search Deskbar, it is the greatest tool ever.

Among so many other things, it allows you to define aliases for common searches. For example, I have defined an alias, yhmf (slightly shortened for readability):

yhmf|yh %s -"All posts tagged with" -"MetaFilter comments by" site:www.metafilter.com

If I type

yhmf [search term]

it spawns a new browser window with the yahoo results for [search term], with the added exclusions.

Not exactly what you are looking for, perhaps (who am I kidding, it is what everybody is looking for), but you might be able to talk it into working..
posted by Chuckles at 11:18 PM on May 29, 2006

I use customizegoogle, which is a Firefox extension. It has a lot of options including filtering specific search results.
posted by donut at 11:28 PM on May 29, 2006

I've had good results with "-wikipedia -encylopedia -gfdl". You lose all the other encyclopedias and GFDL-licensed documents but that's not much.
posted by mendel at 4:30 AM on May 30, 2006

I just ran into the answer last night: somewhere on the Wikipedia special pages lies a common-built list of sites that mirror Wikipedia content, laid out in the format of a block list for the customizegoogle extension. Here's the listing, but I can't find the formated list for customizegoogle.
posted by electric_counterpoint at 5:38 AM on May 30, 2006 [2 favorites]

Here's the CustomizeGoogle-ready list:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirror_filter
posted by mph at 8:39 AM on May 30, 2006 [1 favorite]