Personal Blocklist is a port of the Google Chrome extension by Google that enables you to block sites when you are using Google’s Search engine.
If you run searches on an Internet search engine, you may eventually stumble upon sites that rank highly, but don’t provide a lot of value. You may also have made the decision in the past not to use a particular service, for instance a download portal that ships its downloads with a wrapper that has no other purpose than to bombard you with ads and unpleasant offers.
While you can ignore those results, it happens to be the case that some of the biggest offenders still rank very highly for many search terms.
Personal Blocklist
Personal Blocklist works like the Google Chrome extension except for one difference: blocked sites are not submitted to Google.
The extension adds a “block site” link underneath each search result on Google Search. It works on locale Google Search sites as well, but does not work on other elements such as News, ads, or Knowledge Graph.
You may click on a block link to hide results from that site on the current search page, and all search pages that list the site in the future.
The site is hidden from Google Search effectively. One downside to this is that you may get less results per page as you’d usually get.
The extension displays a notification at the bottom of the search results page if results are hidden.
Some results were removed by the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension.
An option to show those is provided when you click on the show button next to the information.
Blocked sites are displayed again (without page reload). They are highlighted with a light red background for easy identification.
You may unblock sites using the unblock link that is displayed underneath them. The revealing of blocked sites is only enabled on the current page. If you leave the page, either by running a new search or clicking on another page of the results, you will notice that blocked resources are hidden again automatically.
You may use the icon that the extension adds to the main Firefox toolbar for blocking and unblocking as well.
It lists all blocked sites, provides you with options to unblock or edit any of those, and to block the current activate site as well using the method. The latter is useful if you stumble upon a site that you want blocked, but don’t want to wait until it appears on Google Search.
There is also an option to export and import rules. Handy if you want to use the extension on multiple computer systems or Firefox instances.
Verdict
Personal Blocklist is a handy tool for Firefox users who use Google Search. It allows you to block sites from Google Search effectively.
Now You: Which search engine do you use primarily?