Revealed: Two More Google Blacklists Designed to Remove 'Fringe Domains' and Op-Eds From Special Search Results

J. Arthur Bloom
The Daily Caller
Jun. 12, 2019

At least two other blacklists are applied to Google’s web answers feature, one of which is manually edited, documents obtained by The Daily Caller indicate.

The first blacklist, titled “webanswers_url_blacklist,” impacts the company’s “featured snippets” or answer blocks, the type of special search result that appears when questions are typed into the search bar. For example, the question “What is the biggest fish?” yields a special search box on the whale shark.

In screenshots of the blacklist shared with The Daily Caller, the instructions at the top of the page say, “To ensure the blacklist will REMOVE a URL, add a line ‘# REMOVE url’.” And, “To ensure the blacklist WON’T remove a URL by accident, add ‘# PERMIT url’,” indicating that the blacklist is manually edited.

[...]A portion of the fringe domains list was shared with The Daily Caller. On it are the American Spectator, Breitbart, Breaking911, the website of pastor Brian Jones, the website of Bring Your Bible to School Day, Consortium News (published by Robert Parry), St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church, speakerryan.com, The Franklin Society (a cryptocurrency blog), Free Thought Project, The Gateway Pundit, and The Gorka Briefing.

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