One thing less

As you know, I really like it when I can improve things a bit or just getting them to work. Related to my daily work in a technical field I’m confronted with some annoying stuff everyday.

One of them is was the website of www.experts-exchange.com. When searching for technical solutions and answers their website often shows up in the search results. This would be less annoying if the website would be actually useful to me. From my perspective it looks like their business-model is to offer subscriptions for accessing their website. The service is to be able to read the solutions other members found. To make it clear: They want to be paid for giving you access to knowledge delivered to them for free by others. To me it looks like you lock down a Forum or Social Network of your choice and grant access only for money. And I haven’t seen anywhere a guarantee that you get an answer that actually works for you as well. Therefore: Unacceptable for me.

So this side shows up in the search results and just by judging the address I already know that I don’t get any answer there. I really hate this site.

Yesterday lightning struck me and I finally managed it to get rid of this annoying posts in my search results.

Most search engines on the web provide you with a couple of parameters to specify the search results. The parameter I used here was site: Combined with a - to exclude it I could remove that web-page from the results. No big science so far. Actually you would get reminded every time you search for something. So another function becomes handy here: The shortcut searches of the most web-browsers you’re using nowadays.

You can configure the search parameter of your browser search engine with the parameter mentioned above and you never have to think about it again. Finally the I can quit joking about it.

If I’d make it for Google, it would be like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+-site%3Aexperts-exchange.com

Check your preferred search engine for parameters to exclude websites from the search results.