Using -site: to filter domains from your search results

This morning I found myself wishing that Google gave us the ability to filter specific domains from our search results.

There are a number of 'content farms' our there, collections of low quality content whose only purpose is to capture traffic in order to generate ad revenue. I'd like to be able to add these sites to a blacklist so that Google would automatically filter out results from these sites.

As I was thinking about this, an idea popped into my head. I know that you can use the site: operator in a Google search query to limit your results to a specific domain. I wondered if using -site: would remove that domain from the results. Sure enough, it does!

Try it:

• Search query: McGill University
• Search query: McGill University -site:www.mcgill.ca

It should be trivial to build a simple page that allows users to maintain a blacklist and include the necessary parameters when they search against Google. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.