Every time I do a search in Chrome or google.com... "-site:pinterest.*" is added to the end. Why is that happening?

[zamardii12]

Basically the title. I am so tired of seeing this and can find nothing online about it.

Thanks.

 

[pendragon1]

check your extensions and or do a reset in the options.

 

[Nobu]

Somebody who was using your computer was tired of getting pinterest results, and edited your default search engine in your browser preferences.

 

[BudgetBuilder]

Hold on, you can edit your search results to remove certain websites automatically? I think my head just exploded.

 

[Nobu]

Can't remember how to edit the search engine off hand, but here's the gist:

The URL for searching on most engines goes something like this:

Https://[domain]/?q=[query]

Where [domain] is google, bing duckduckgo, etc., and [query] is a '+' or ' ' ("space character", usually encoded as %20) delimited search terms.

A browser usually substitutes %s for the query string, so your default search engine would be something like this:

Https://www.google.com/?q=%s

If you want to include anything else, you just need to add it immediately before or after %s, with the space delimiter so your search terms don't squish together:

Https://www.google.com/?q=-site:*.youtube.com+%s

Searching for jellybeans with the above search engine string would include "-site:*.youtube.com" in the query, which excludes results from all youtube subdomains. If you wanted results only from youtube, you just have to remove the hyphen ("-") from before "site:".

There used to be lots of other stuff you could do with searches, boolean AND, NOT, OR, but they were removed or given less priority as search engines became "smarter". NOT ("-") still somewhat works, but google likes to interpret your query loosly and give every freaking result except what you want, even if you exclude a particular word, making that operator less useful. Still works well for excluding whole domains from results, though.

 

[ChoGGi]

but google likes to interpret your query loosly and give every freaking result except what you want

You can add an arg to do a "verbatim" search by default:
&tbs=li:1