glasskeys.com

Todays glasskeys.com post will provide a useful tool not only for tablet and mobile users, but desktop users also. Over the last three months I have read much about content farms: the advert-laden sites that crop up with ever increasing frequency on Google search results. Expert at gaming search engines, they have incited scorn from a variety of users and have even motivated some search engines such as blekko to ban content from alleged “content farm” sites entirely.

I began investigating on how one could instruct Google to exclude web sites from search results. Google helpfully provides the answer on this search help page. Google also offers a free plug-in for Chrome that allows one to create personal blocklists to keep sites from appearing in search results if Chrome is running on a supported computer. Since iOS devices cannot run Chrome, that leaves iPad, iPhone and other tablet users breathing content farm dust so to speak. So at that point I decided to create a web tool that filters many alleged content farm pages from search results and works on the following platforms:

• Safari on the iPad, iPhone, Mac OS X & Windows
• Chrome on Mac OS X and Windows
• IE 7 on Windows
• Firefox is misbehaving, but should be working soon.

To get a list of sites to filter, I consulted this list from jongales.com, and this techcrunch article. The screenshots above show the glasskeys CFE site in use. CFE incidentally stands for content farm eliminator and yes the name makes me laugh too.

So without further ado, here is the link to glasskeys CFE. The simple page source, spreadsheet, and helpful text files zipped to help “roll your own” CFE is available for download here. If you are using Safari on the iPad/iPhone, tapping this link will directly download the zip file into GoodReader storage.