Don’t feel like feeding into the machine of content farms, which mine your searches in order to create stories that fit the terms you just plugged in to find something? Google Chrome has introduced a new extension called Personal Blocklist so you can hide what you’re looking for.

Google search engineer Matt Cutts introduced it this week, notes the Washington Post‘s Rob Pegororo. Personal Blocklist lets you click a link under your results to remove that site from future searches. You can always uncover blocked results with a “show” link.

Cutts say Google will be watching, in a good way.

If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

This could help to stem the tide of content farms who analyze popular search trends and then regurgitate content to match those queries. That’s why there are stories out there about how to groom troll dolls or other crappy “articles” that may or may not be actually helpful to anyone. This all leads to search results on Google that are irrelevant and uninformative. Down with SEO trickery!

Google adds content-farm blocking extension to Chrome [Washington Post]

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