A great new feature request!

[Erik Jon]

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Hi, friends.

I am new to "Ad Block Plus" but I had a great idea for an improvement. What I don't know is if there is any way to use the current add-on to accomplish what I had in mind. Please forgive me if there is, as my post assumes that there is not.

I see the need for a certain feature that could enhance the browsing experience for every user without exception. It would help eliminate false advertising from the Internet, and false leads in our searches.

As you know, there exists what is called the "bait-and-switch" trick, which was formerly used by many companies to sell their products, but has since become illegal in some countries. Companies would advertise a certain product at a certain price, but when customers would come in, to buy the item, a salesman would tell them, "I'm sorry. That item is no longer available, but let me show you something better..." It was merely a trick used in order to get customers into the store, wasting the customer's time and money, while promoting an ever-increasing environment of distrust in the marketplace.

While this may be illegal in many venues today, it appears to be rampant on the Internet.

We do a Google search, for example, to find tips on how to "defragment our hard drive," and in the serach results appears a link to a website that has merely matched our keywords automatically, in order to trick us into navigating to that site. When we arrive, we find the heading, "Looking for help on 'defragment our hard drive'? Buy from us. We sell the following hard drives and computer accessories, at rock-bottom prices..." Of course, we were not looking for new hard drives, but only for tips on how to defragment the one we had. Does the website care? Of course not. Do they lose any time or money by re-directing and misleading us? Not at all. Who suffers from the deception? We do.

I say that we put a stop to it.

Another common case is the Google search result that, when the link is clicked, merely re-directs you to another search engine or to another set of search results, without giving you the information that it had offered in the original Google search results. Now you have either to prolong your search within their site (if you are a sucker), or else go back to the original search results and try another link within them. Enough is enough.

While there are too many tricksters out there from too many countries, for us to be able to punish them legally, we can at least cut them off from our own browsing permanently. We can punish them by blocking their websites forever, but I am not speaking of blocking them by the usual means.

There are already browser add-ons that offer simple blocking of advertisements or of websites. This is not enough. As you know, we continue to get false leads in our search results, because, even though we may block some of these websites, they continue to appear in the search results. We may not remember which is which, weeks later, and we may continue to click on the links. When we do, several "webiste-blocker add-ons" out there may simply open a new tab within the browser, and display a message that says, "This website has been blocked" or "You have chosen to permanently block this website using this add-on." Now we must back-track to the original search results, and try another link. (God forbid that we should have a slow Internet connection throughout all of this.) The fact is, we were still tricked into clicking on the link, and all the add-on did was to tell us that the site was blocked. Meanwhile the site still got a little "free advertising" in on us, as we are always confronted with the name of their site in the link. To be frank, we don't need reminders about what was blocked and what was not, we just want real search results, and we want them fast, right? Otherwise, this type of website-blocker is comparable to having a postman knock at our front door, every day, only to tell us that the mail that he has already placed in our mailbox does not include any unsolicited "junk mail", and that it was already disposed of previously at the post office. While the news is comforting, in the long run, who cares? Just leave my real mail in the mailbox, do what you will with the other, and stop knocking at my door every day, making be believe that I may have a "special delivery" awaiting. While I appreciate his help, the daily reminder ends up wasting my time.

With all due respect, we need a more complete form of blocking. What we need is to block the website--perhaps even at its root--in such a way that no link to it will so much as appear in our search results. We would like to punish these companies and individuals who have lied to us (or else who have paid Google to present their false leads as valid, in the search results). We need to punish them by simply banishing their websites forever, not from the Internet but from our browsing experience altogether--which includes the Google search results themselves. We need an add-on that can apply this block not just to Google results, but to all the major search engines at the same time, at the discretion of the user, of course, and can eliminate permanently any reminders that those sites are being blocked. In this way we would never see the name of those websites again, would never be tempted to click on any links to them, and would never inadvertently "reward" them by making a future purchase. As a result, deceptive websites would either eventually go out of business (as more and more users would continue to block them, and they would find themselves with hardly any "hits" anymore) or else they would learn their lesson, and stop offering false leads.

Of course, in some cases, we would be faced with websites that we still needed, in spite of their deceptive practices. There may be a site, for example, that sells the cheapest CDs around, but which also participates in this process of offering misleading search results, by giving us false leads every time we include the term "CD" in our searches. Fine. The user could have the option of excluding such a site from the "blocking," only because he has yet to find an alternative source for his CDs. Even so, the add-on would remove many hundreds of other false leads, thereby making the browsing experience much more practical, enjoyable and profitable to all of us.

Now, I may very well have wasted my breath in all this, if there is already some way to make Ad Block Plus perform this function of blocking certain names within the search results themselves--and without giving us any reminders. If so, please accept my apology and kindly tell me how to do it.

Otherwise, I think we still have not reached the right goal. I offer my gratitude in advance to anyone who can create such a feature, as he will save many thousands of users many many headaches.

Sincerely grateful,

Erik Jon
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[lewisje]

We can't change the search results that Google or any other search engine shows to other users; however, something like what you're talking about (blocking links to scam sites) is within the scope of the spam404 blocklist, a new and highly recommended ABP subscription.

[Erik Jon]

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I understand.

But, as Firefox is a sort of "filter" anyway, through which those search results must pass in order to be viewed, I assume that some additional "filtering" of this sort can be done, perhaps just as easily as pornography filters, for example.
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