New Chrome extension blocks sites from Google results

With Google making efforts to improve the quality of its search results, it is now giving users the opportunity to block certain sites from search results. The extension would be available for its Chrome browser, and user's actions in blocking sites could become part of Google's fight against spam content.

"We've been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content," principal engineer Matt Cutts explained. "One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users."

Cutts is the same person who had earlier opined for Google that spam was becoming an increasingly bigger problem for the search site. "We have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we've already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality," he said in a blog post last month.

He must have been hinting at the Chrome extension released on Monday.

As the user uses Google within Chrome, below each search result would be the option to block the domain from future results. This data is then sent to Google for processing. It was not immediately clear if this was done anonymously, however.

Users would be able to manage the list of blocked sites, and edit and delete entries. If a result is blocked, a message would appear at the bottom of the page similar to when Google automatically removes duplicate results.

The feature is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish, and is available from the Chrome Web Store.