Google has rolled out a new extension for its Chrome browser that allows users to block chosen websites from showing up in Google search results.

The extension is called Personal Blocklist ,  which when installed adds an option beneath each search results to block the source website. If a user clicks the block option, Chrome blocks and removes any results from that specific domain from being shown to you.

 

Once you block a website, future search results shown to you will never have content from that website. Of course one can always revoke the entire blocked list to show all the search results with a single click:

One can also edit the list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension's icon in the top right of the Chrome window.

It's more than just better personal search experience. Google says that this Chrome extension is all about curbing the rise of content farms, websites that create vast quantities of low-quality content and rely on search for their traffic.

When a user blocks a site in his/her search, that information is transmitted to Google, where it could be used as an additional criteria of the company’s complex search algorithms.

“We've been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content” writes Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google.

 

It’s a move that’s definitely out of character for the famously algorithm-centric company, but it has had limited success when it comes to stopping content farms. With millions of people participating in the search filtering process, Google expects to make their search results more accurate and relevant to the user.