How to Exclude Specific Websites or TLDs from Google Search Results?

Many users prefer to avoid websites they don’t trust or simply don’t find helpful. For instance, you might want to exclude Reddit or Quora when searching for answers or recommendations.

My personal frustration is that when I travel to other countries, Google mostly shows me local websites (e.g., *.pl domains) even when I search in English.

Luckily, I found a way to exclude specific websites or even entire geoTLDs (such as .ru or .es) from Google search results. You can do that manually or you can automate the process.

1. Use the “-site:” Advanced Search Operator (a manual way)

Google offers a range of advanced search operators that can refine your search results. Two of these operators are particularly useful for excluding unwanted sites:

Minus Sign (-): This operator allows you to exclude search results containing a specific word. For example, “laptop -lenovo” filters out out pages that mention “Lenovo.”

Operator (site:): This operator limits search results to a specific website. For example, “site:bloggerjet.com rank tracking tools” will show results only from bloggerjet.com.

A combination of these two operators can exclude search results from specific websites.

For example, if you want to exclude results from Reddit and Quora, you can use something like:

search query -site:reddit.com -site:quora.com

And to filter out specific top-level domains, you can use:

search query -site:.uk

or simply

search query -site:uk

Note: It is important not to put a space after the minus symbol.

2. Customize Google search in Chrome (automated)

If you don’t want to refine your search manually, you can automate this process in Chrome by adding a custom search engine.

1. Click on the three dots in Chrome’s top-right corner and access the Settings.

2. Click on the Search engine -> Manage search engines and site search.

3. Click on the pencil icon next to “Google” or “Google (default)” in the Search Engines section.

4. Copy the contents of the URL with %s in place of query field.

This code is what enables your browser to search on Google directly from the browser bar, pulls automplete, history, etc. Note that this code can vary for users or change over time. I’ll leave mine below, just in case:

{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:language}{google:prefetchSource}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}

5. Click Cancel to return to the search engines settings and click the Add button

6. Give your new search method a name and a shortcut and paste the code into the URL with %s in place of the query field.

Then, add the unwanted domain(s) or TLD(s) after “%s” in the following format:

+-site:domain1.com+-site:domain2.com

or

+-site:TLD1+-site:TLD2

For example, this is how you exclude Reddit and Quora:

{google:baseURL}search?q=%s+-site:reddit.com+-site:quora.com&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:language}{google:prefetchSource}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}

And the following code will exclude Russian (.ru) domains from your search results

{google:baseURL}search?q=%s+-site:ru&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:language}{google:prefetchSource}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}

7. Set this custom search engine as your default search.

How to use

Simply type your query into Chrome’s address bar and press Enter.

That’s it!

If you know a more convenient way to exclude websites from Google search results, let me know on X!

And, by the way, there is a very similar process if you need to get 100 results per page on Google.