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 see it adds that syntax right to the query ⁓ and excludes it from the results. ⁓ So we’ve had that since we first launched this menu about a year ago. ⁓ And it works pretty well. We got some good feedback about that when we first launched it. ⁓ We also added that menu to give us the ability to have users flag specific results ⁓ for a variety of reasons. So users can tell us about individual results that they don’t like if they click Share Feedback about this site. ⁓ But the new feature is that you can now choose to block this site from all results. So you don’t have to add that syntax to the query every time you want to remove it. So if I do that, you get this little message saying that it’s been blocked successfully. And I’m not sure if my screen is showing it, but you get a message at the top that tells you that you have one result hidden from a site that you’ve blocked. And you can also go into your settings and you can see the sites that you’ve blocked and manage them.
Gabriel:
Sweet and reception so far. don’t think, cause I think it was new. I don’t think we’ve done a lot of announcements of this yet. ⁓ by the curious, like, is it starting to get usage? Like that kind of thing.
Greg:
Yeah, we’re seeing a relatively ⁓ growing number of searches per day that use this block in some form. The vast majority are only blocking a single site. ⁓ We’ve talked about it little bit in a couple of places ⁓ on social and also just have users write in through our usual feedback channels to tell us about it. ⁓ You know, I think the theme here is that... We just are giving users more choice ⁓ in how their search results work. They can ⁓ do some level of customization to their own needs. ⁓ And so this is kind of another feature that helps to accomplish that. And I think that’s generally appreciated. There are some limitations also to this that we’ve heard about too, and we’re thinking about how to make it even better. But yes, growing usage and some positive results. reaction so far.
Gabriel:
Sweet, yeah, I agree. We’ve been doing customization for a long time. mean, like this, the settings screen you’re just showing shows how many settings we actually support in terms of customization, which is a lot. And it reminds me of the AI filter that we also recently launched to remove ⁓ some AI image search results. ⁓ This, like you said, it’s a little different because it’s more like... specific domains that are coming up a lot that you really don’t like. ⁓ But yeah, I’m curious, like, given the feedback so far, and I remember now seeing several subreddit people finding it and posting positive things about it, subreddit posts. But yeah, like, where are we thinking of taking this in the future? Or like, are there other features, kind of like the AI one that kind of merges or circles around this same idea of like removing things?
Greg:
Yeah, there are a couple of things. mean, you know, as a starting point, we had a limitation of five domains, up to five domains that users could do. You know, part of that was based on this hypothesis that most users really would only want to block one or two, which I think is what we’re seeing. We have had people ask us for more. We’re exploring how we would do that. You know, these things are always...
Gabriel:
In pause of that, partly a couple follow-up questions. One is, it’s client-side now, right? Like, you’re, you block the domains, you’re actually getting the results back, but then your client is removing them based on your settings.
Greg:
That’s correct, yeah, the result is there, it’s just not shown.
Gabriel:
Got it. And the second thing is like, I think we were also talking about like, if you remove too many, that’s probably the way I put the message up. Like you may actually want them sometimes when they’re really relevant. And then if you remove tons of domains and then you remove actually good stuff sometimes, then you’re going to think our search results are terrible because you actually removed stuff that was important that one time.
Greg:
That’s right. One of the things we tested when we built this was how often do we see just a page of all the same domain, such that if a user removed that domain, they would get a no results page and think that the search engine was broken. ⁓
Gabriel:
You’re like, no results that time, yeah.
Greg:
It’s not zero, right? If I, for example, typed in, you know, I wanna see something on W3 schools from that example from a minute ago and got all results from there, it would just be an empty page. So we wanna be able to say, hey, you’ve made some customization here that’s hiding some results from you and you have the option then to see them.
Gabriel:
But nevertheless, we’re, I we set five initially, but we’re thinking about increasing it at least a little bit.
Greg:
That’s right. They’re also, ⁓ right now they only apply to those organic texts. link results. We’re looking at expanding that to other kinds of content on the page that it should also apply to. ⁓ And there’s potentially overlap with the AI image feature that you talked about. ⁓ Certainly, there’s some use cases around ⁓ news or videos or other kinds of content that users might want to have a little bit more customization around.
Gabriel:
And it’s also, I it’s also possible that, you know, similar to the AI image list, we could use a kind of organic AI list to have a different feature, but a similar kind of toggle to like remove AI organics or something like that.
Greg:
Yeah, that’s definitely something we’re looking at too. I mean, it’s a similar kind of ⁓ challenge and part of the challenge there is just that there are so many new sites kind of popping up every day. ⁓ And so this feature is less geared around that. I would put that in more of the sort of... ⁓ spam category, results that are ⁓ things that maybe very, very rarely get clicked ⁓ on, very fresh, ⁓ but not a ton of original content. ⁓ There are potentially other things that we wanna add on top of this feature to kind of supplement that and help users not have so many of those showing up in their results too.
Gabriel:
I guess related to that, I you showed the menu where we have, and you could submit feedback. think we’ve also, I mean, you could submit feedback there that it’s a spam site. I think we might’ve also recently added, you could submit that it’s an AI spam site, but we actually use that information. And to the extent that we ultimately make a feature that might toggle off some of that, like we would use that feedback. So if you’re out there and you wanna submit us feedback, that’s a good way to do it for like sites that you’re finding you don’t. are completely not relevant,
Greg:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Maybe I’ll just show that real quick because...
Gabriel:
Yeah, that’s good. I mean, we want more feedback on this particular variety.
Greg:
We do. mean, the more feedback we get about it, the better. ⁓ So say I come in here and go share feedback about this site. ⁓ You can select that a site ⁓ is AI generated. You can sort of tell us anything you might want to tell us about that, or you can just send that and it will flag it for us to review. we obviously, we get a bunch of these every day now. ⁓ We only added this AI generated option a couple of weeks ago even, we’ve had the spam option, which we’ve used ⁓ for a while. ⁓ But we’re sort of looking at these, ⁓ we’re investing in other ways to help us kind of verify that something is in fact AI generated. ⁓ And it’s a pretty new ⁓ space and I think we’re sort of learning what works well for that. again, if you’re out there and you want to tell us about these, ⁓ we are kind of building up our capabilities around this and making use of that feedback directly.
Gabriel:
Sweet. Great. Anything I missed about this feature or you didn’t tell us that you want to share?
Greg:
⁓ I think that just kind of on the topic of choice and customization, we put a decent amount of thought into ⁓ how we make it clear to users that ⁓ this feature is in effect, that you’ve blocked a site, ⁓ how you kind of manage the list of blocked sites once you... ⁓ you know, once you’ve done that. I think, you know, we’d love to hear other feedback about how well that’s working, how clear that is. ⁓ You know, we kind of build these things and put them out there. We test them a lot. But, you know, as we add more functionality to this, you know, we’re always looking for... ⁓ for feedback about how well it works and ways to make it better. So, you know, that’s one particular piece that to me was really important when we built it was, you know, we don’t want to create a feature kind of thinking it’s useful and then, you know, make something that is... inadvertently creating confusion or making it harder for users to find what they’re looking for. So that’s something we’re kind of on the lookout for as we try to improve it.
Gabriel:
That’s great. It reminds me of one last thing, which I think we should just basically have a future episode about. just to tease out, I’m sure we’re going to get this point of feedback in the next, this is prediction, in the next month from our subreddit. I set these sites that I don’t want to see, and then I cleared all my settings, and now I have to redo them. ⁓ Unfortunately, outside of our browser, we don’t really have a lot of control with that because settings... We don’t have accounts and settings are getting stored in browser storage. And if you clear all the browser storage for an up to go, then this goes away. However, we are working on ⁓ syncing your search settings to your browser settings. So if you’re using our browser, ⁓ we won’t lose your search settings. And that is a thing that people have been asking for for literally a decade. And so I’m very excited about working on it. Not that we’re done with it yet, but like ⁓ maybe when we first... have that working, could come back and do another episode with somebody.
Greg:
Yeah, I think it would be great to showcase that. we’ve tried a number of ⁓ technical solutions to try to reduce the ⁓ accidental clearing of settings. ⁓ And yeah, we have less control outside of our browsers. But even there, think we’ve made some strides. ⁓ Within our browsers, there’s a lot more we can do ⁓ and then ways to allow users to sync. ⁓ So we could definitely showcase that.
Gabriel:
Cool. Well, thank you, Greg, for coming on to DuckTales and thank you everybody for listening. And until next time.
Greg:
Thanks, Gabriel.
