Showing posts with label Ad block. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ad block. Show all posts

Thursday, March 4, 2021

People also search for...

I noticed an annoying feature of the Google search page recently. If you do a search, click a link, look at the page and click back, just as you are about to click on the next link, a Google pop-up entitled "People also search for" displaces the link you were about to click so you click on a link you don't want, and have to go back again, whereupon the same thing happens again. Ad infinitum.

I think this is called recursion in computing.

The Gif above (I used ezgif.com) when searched Google for information about the pop-up.

The link I was about to click would have taken me to the answer to this stupidity: the excellent uBlock Origin, which I had been using until a few weeks ago, probably why I hadn't observed it before. For the last few weeks I've been using Bluhell Firewall, another excellent ad-blocker. I used this previously until it stopped working, but it has recently been updated to work with Firefox WebExtensions. It blocks most of the nonsense on the net, but obviously not this bit. It is a bit lighter than uBlock.

Another possible solution, if this feature of Google search annoys you as much as it does me is Startpage, a search page that gets its results from Google but without the tracking. By default the first three links it shows are search suggestions, but you can turn that off in settings (or leave it on to give them some ad revenue - unfortunately I found it meant I didn't see the results I wanted without scrolling down the page, which is a bit self-defeating, sorry Startpage). You can also change the default setting for search results to open in a new tab (window in settings).

Doh! More recursion.












Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Tracking cookies

F-Secure has a good write up on tracking cookies. Ed Bott tells how to eliminate them. The only problem with this method is the rare occasion when an action on a website requires a third-party cookie. (Logging into WordPress seems to do so.) I've looked at a couple of Firefox extension that block tracking cookies while still allowing third-party cookies. They are Ghostery and the Easy Privacy list for Adblock Plus. Both seem to work well.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Ad blocking in Opera

Yes, I know they pay for sites, but ads are just too in-your-face, irritating and dumb. Not on all sites, but blame the sites that have flashing ads, video ads, ads for junk, even ads with sound. Here's how to block ads in Opera.
Go to Tools>Advanced>Blocked Content. Now all you have to do is enter some of the most common ad server web addresses. Addresses have to be entered one by one. Blogote has a short list that doesn't take too long to enter and seems to be effective.
Opera stores the web addresses in a file called urlfilter.ini. A longer list of ad server addresses can be entered into this file. Tamil has A full description and a list of ad server addresses.
urlfilter.ini does not exist by default. Use the first method to add a few addresses and Opera will create the file. The longer list can then be cut and paste in, making sure addresses follow the same format.

Update: Opera 11 now has extensions- and there are a couple of ad blockers available, so this post is now redundant.