The Google Anti-Adspam Greasemonkey script.

Interesting response on Hacker News to my and others' posts on Google Adspam:

Given the current high-ranking thread about spammy sites in Google results, it strikes me that a very simple solution would be to let logged-in users blacklist sites.

Bam, no more wareseeker or efreedom.

This would solve a lot of people's complaints in one fell swoop.

There are greasemonkey etc. scripts to do this, but they're tied to a single browser on a single machine. A global filter (like in gmail) would be so much more useful.

Would this be particularly hard to do?

Comments are interesting too - firstly, there is the exploration of a social graph blacklisting:

I think a personal black-list would be ideal initially as those most motivated would be most helped, i.e. the majority of people who might not care about the status quo are then not impacted at all.

As mentioned above, then introducing the shared-ranking via the social graph would be the next logical step. It could be something opt-in'd to ease adoption.

Then, ideally (and this is my personal 'white whale' problem) it would be great to imagine something where the user could whitelist through no action of their own rather than have to do any work to block, i.e. use the result set 'hit' of what's clicked in the results to act as a personal ranking upvote.

There's some interesting engineering issues of per-user indexing though, but hey, you wanted to work at Google right?

......

The blacklist does not only have to affect me, just throw in the blacklists of my social graph too. These are the people I trust.

Other ideas are a "report spam" system:

I want a search results page similar to the "Priority Inbox" we got recently in gmail. Set sane defaults and let me override them with "Important/Notimportant" buttons (or thumbs up/down or whatever) next to results. Let it learn what I think is a good result for my needs. If you make it a little bit social, make sure you weight other people's opinions by how much they agree with my own in other areas (making it harder for sockpuppets to muddy the waters)

All in all it goes to a theme we have been banging on for quite a while about, ie allowing user-defined filtering for web-services (Whether Google, Twitter etc). But as many point out, Google is conflicted here, as these sites generate fast churn of click through pages so a high Ad turnover - so are probably not motivated to do it: