A Simple Chrome Extension Fights Content Farms

Recently, one of the biggest gaps between Google's Chrome browser and Mozilla's Firefox browser has closed, as a whole universe of useful extensions has appeared for Chrome after Firefox capitalized on them for years. If you're not using extensions but are using Chrome--branch out. Extensions can add many conveniences.

Now, a very notable new extension for Chrome has appeared, called Personal Blocklist, and it's designed to fight content farms. The author is Google, and Google ought to bring more useful extensions like this out.

As International Business Times notes:

"Aimed at stripping search results of pages from 'low-quality' sites, a new Google Chrome extension allows users to block specified websites from appearing in search results. The names of these sites are then sent to Google, which will study the collected results and use them to determine future page ranking systems."

The key part of the statement above is the last part. Google will evaluate the collected low-quality sites--often content farms--and optimize future search results to steer away from their content. When Google decided to come out with a browser, there were already countless other ones, but this is exactly why a Google browser makes sense. Most of us use Google search, and many of use Google's open source browser. Why shouldn't the browser and the search engine work in tandem to make using the web a better experience?

In all likelihood, Google engineers can come up with other extensions that minimize garbage encountered in our web experiences, and maximize convenience. In the world of extensions, community developers at large deserve high praise, but Google is uniquely positioned to create extensions that optimize its oh-so-popular search engine.