Episode Details

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Greg (Product, Search) discuss how we’re giving users even more ways to customize their search experience with site exclusions — an easy way to remove certain websites from appearing in search results.

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Gabriel:Hello again, welcome to DuckTales, our inside DuckDuckGo podcast video thing. I don’t know what you call us exactly. Today I have Greg with us. Greg, you want to introduce yourself?

Greg:Hello, ⁓ I’m Greg Fiorentino. ⁓ I ⁓ work on the product team here at DuckDuckGo. I’ve been here almost seven years, which is wild, time flies, ⁓ but yeah.

Gabriel:That is a long time. And you’re underselling yourself a little bit. Yes, you’re on product team, but for the last while and for the future, you’re running our search engine, correct?

Greg:Yeah, that’s right. Search retention, ⁓ I have worked across local search, the search ads, ⁓ lots of different things. ⁓

Gabriel:Sweet, and today we are talking about a relatively new search feature that we launched that people are liking. And you know what, I won’t even introduce it. I’ll leave you to share your screen and let’s walk through it.

Greg:Sure. So ⁓ we now ⁓ have the ability to, ⁓ for users to exclude ⁓ individual domains ⁓ from their search results. So I’ll kind of show real quick what this looks like. Let’s say I’m doing a, I’m writing some code and I want to do a technical search. I want to figure out how to do an array of strings in TypeScript.

Gabriel:Those who don’t know TypeScript is a programming language. Yes, right. JavaScript-ish.

Greg:Programming language, yeah, yeah, yeah. Super set of JavaScript. So let’s say I want to know how to do this and I get a bunch of search results and I see some here. And some of these are sites I know and like, and maybe some of them I want to exclude. I don’t want to throw too much shade, but let me just pick one and kind of go. So let’s say I don’t want to get results from W3 schools.

Gabriel:I’ve seen so many comments about people wanting to get rid of W3Skulls, not to throw shade. I’ve used W3Skulls before and I don’t find it that bad, but there’s a lot of people who seem to not like it who would probably want to remove it, so.

Greg:Yeah I’ve used it too. Yeah. Yeah, and I would say, mean, this feature, I think, is particularly good for use cases like this, where there’s a site that maybe comes up a lot, and for whatever reason, a user has kind of a disposition that they just don’t want to see that site. We have other ways to accomplish this. ⁓ You can just put minus site and then the domain in your query.

Gabriel:So you could do that for a long time, right? This minus sign thing. But this menu, which people don’t even maybe realize exists a lot of people, is relatively new, like maybe a year ago or something like that.

Greg:Yeah, we added this menu a little over a year ago to all organics, and organics being these text results. And at first, And in fact, I can just show if I click this redo search without this site, you’ll