[ratww]

Were they? I remember having to manually block myself a lot of those copycat wikipedia/stackoverflow sites back in 2011 or 2012 when they had the domain-blocklist option available for users. When the feature was removed, it all came back.

Maybe the problem is just that there are more of those now.

[ASalazarMX]

Google removed that option without even trying to spin it as a pro-consumer change. The only problems I can think it brought to Google are clueless users complaining that they can no longer see microsoft.com in their results, and having a negative impact on unethical advertisers.