Thursday, July 09, 2020

How do I filter .ru out of a Google search?

I routinely use Google to look for things online that mention me. Recently it's gotten much harder because of the increasing number of web pages that are constructed by taking chunks of text from elsewhere likely to get clicked on, mashing them together, and then showing you either a fake update of adobe flash player or a fake exchange about downloading some book for free, generally the book that one chunk of text referred to. Both are presumably ways of getting something onto your computer that you don't want there.

It would be nice if someone could provide a way of filtering out all of those, but that might be hard. But a large fraction, probably a majority, are .ru URL's, and it should be possible to filter those out of a search.

Can someone more familiar with the more advanced features of Google tell me how to do it?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

try adding "-site:.ru" to the search.
compare: russian wodehouse society vs russian wodehouse society -site:.ru

Anonymous said...

Even just adding -.ru to a Google search will filter those results out.

Anonymous said...

I'm curious, what search terms are you using? I tried "David Friedman" and didn't see anything except .com, .org and .edu in the first 10 pages of results.

I do agree that cut-and-paste web pages are a serious problem these days.

Tim Lambert said...

You can report bad search results to Google
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713
and then they can learn how to remove them from their results.

David Friedman said...

Many thanks to Anonymous for his first suggestion, which works. I had tried -.ru and it didn't work, but perhaps I was doing something wrong.

I use a long search string which includes my name and -ambassador (to eliminate the David Friedman who is ambassador to Israel) plus lots of other minuses to eliminate less likely false positives.

MikeK said...

There's an extension called "uBlacklist" (there's one for Chrome as well as one for Firefox) that lets you filter particular patterns out of Google searches. For example, I have pinterest filtered out of image searches. You should be able to add a filter for "*://*.ru/*"

Anonymous said...

-.ru works for me:
russian wodehouse society -.ru