Peek-a-boo

Following Google's strange behaviour as reported in my last post, I've been playing a bit. I stumbled on givemebackmygoogle recently which claims to give "Google™ results without the annoying affiliate links". Taking a little peek under the bonnet, it seems that it strips out links to price comparison sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner from your search results.

An example: say you wanted to search for stereo headphones. The first results page Google returns includes places like Comparestoreprices, Ciao and Dooyoo. But what if you're not interested in price comparison websites? All these links can be a real annoyance. Give me back my google, or GmbmG as it calls itself, strips them all out.

What I find interesting is not the site itself which, in all honesty I probably wouldn't use, but the way it works. It uses a known Google search feature called -inurl that simply excludes one or more websites from your search. In fact you can type in your own -inurl keywords. This is a really useful idea because you can use it for all manner of other things.

For example, if I want to find information, say on the book, Sabriel by Garth Nix, but I don't want any Amazon nonsense listed in the results, I can type this in the Google search: sabriel -inurl(amazon)

What this does is to exclude results for amazon.co.uk or amazon.com because any link that contains the word amazon in the url is stripped out. I can exclude results for more than one site by separating each word with the "|" character (that's the vertical broken bar character that's to the left of the 'z' on a UK keyboard, or somewhere over to the right on a US keyboard).
So I could do something like this: sabriel -inurl(amazon|ebay)

The result is a better search with fewer distractions :-) So that's good isn't it?