Recently I have been plagued by search results polluted by low-quality and/or uninformative results. One website annoys me in particular, which I will refer to as mediocre.com. Hence, I would like for these articles to never appear in my search results again.

Firefox luckily allows you to configure your search, but it is not as user-friendly as one might hope.

First we need to allow custom search engines at all:

  • Go to about:config
  • Search for the key browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh
  • Set it to true (you might need to create it if it does not exist already)

Next, we need to obtain our search template.

  • Search for dummy -site:mediocre.com using your favourite search engine
  • Get the URL from the search result page (in my case https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dummy+-site%3Amediocre.com)
  • Replace dummy with %s (in my case https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+-site%3Amediocre.com)

Then, we can add this as a custom search in firefox.

  • Go to about:preferences#search
  • Under Search Shortcuts click add
  • Fill in all the info
    • the name is not very important
    • Engine URL would be https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s+-site%3Amediocre.com for me
    • As Alias I chose a period (.)

Optionally you can make that the default search engine. There, just select whatever name you gave it previously. If you don’t want to use your custom search every time, you can begin a search query with the alias you chose previously to make firefox use the template for that particular search.

I will now happily never see annoying articles anymore. I thought it would be useful enough to share :)

Enjoy!