Affine - Remove unwanted sites from your search engine results
Tired of irrelevant sites and advertising? Wouldn't it be nice if you could:
- Hide unwanted sites in your search engine results?
- Get rid of sponsored links, banners and advertising?
- Search faster by going directly to the sites you click, rather than sending your browsing habits to search engines?
Hover to enlarge
When you view search engine results, Affine adds two icons next to each result: the
icon, which hides the site
and the 
icon which fades it, for this and all future searches.
The toolbar allows you to switch the filtering on and off and shows the number of sites currently
hidden.
Things that are better off hidden
- Subscription sites. You've already decided that you don't want to pay to view a site's content, why display it in your results?
- Bookshops. You're looking for a solution now, buying a book is not going to solve your immediate problem.
- Abstract catalogs. The search engine will find the article you're after if it exists anyway, what use is the abstract?
- Patent sites. How often do you really want to know about a patent?
- Workplace. Many companies bar employees from visiting to social and video websites. If the site is forbidden, there's no point in displaying a link to it.
Features
- Works with all major search engines
(About, Alexa, AOL, Ask, Bing, Cuil, Excite, Google, Yahoo) - Speeds your browsing by removing redirects
- Tested with XP, Vista, IE6 IE7 and IE8
- No limits, spyware, adware or nagware
- It's free!
Download instructions
- Click here: affine.zip
(2.3 Mb. Downloads : 19)
- If you receive a warning message in the Explorer bar, choose "Download file"
- Select "SAVE" and choose a folder on your computer
- Unzip affine.zip and run setup.exe
- Leave a comment on my blog >;-)
FAQ
Installing
What does Affine cost? Nothing, it's free, enjoy it!
Does it contain any spyware, nagware, crippleware, limitations?No, I have better things to do with my life. If you downloaded Affine from here, then I guarantee it's clean. If you find a copy with viruses elsewhere, please let me know, and I'll do something nasty to the culprit
What are the pre-requisites?None, except Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0 (the setup program will prompt you to install it if necessary)
Is there a version for Firefox / Opera / …? No. For FireFox, you might want to look at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9275, which seems to provide similar functionality
Using
Will Affine slow my browsing? Imperceptibly. It takes Affine about 0.05 seconds to analyse a 100-result page on my pokey 1.8GHz laptop, but you'll save at least this every time you click a result on a re-directing search engine
The hide and fade icons have disappeared. What's wrong?Most likely reason: You've inadvertently switched off the filter. If the filter icon on the Affine toolbar hasn't got a blue circle on it, click to re-enable the filter.
Another reason: You are browsing with the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer, which is not supported, sorry.
Unlikely (and unpleasant) reason: The search engine has changed the format of its search results to the extent that Affine can no longer identify the links to add the icons. Please, send me an email and I'll do my best to fix the problem, as it affects all Affine users. Thanks.
Faded sites are too dim, can I make them a bit darker? Sure. Click the Affine icon 
on the toolbar to open the settings dialog. In the Options tab, change the % to a higher value.
on the toolbar to open the settings dialog. In the Options tab, change the % to a higher value. It doesn't work with search engine XYZ. What can I do? Send me an email. I'll do my best to add the parameters for your engine. But I can't promise anything…
Can I copy my list of unwanted sites to another computer? Sure. Your unwanted sites are in C:\Documents and Settings\[YourName]\Application Data\Affine\sites.txt - just copy this file to the same place on your other PC and restart Internet Explorer.
Geek's corner
What's this "removes re-direction" claim?
The results links in most search engines are links to the engine itself, who learns what you clicked and then re-directs you to
the site that you selected. Affine removes these re-directions and points the link directly to the target site.
You get where you want to go, quicker.
Does it affect the HTML source code if I "view source"? No. Affine modifies IE's DOM directly, you can't see these changes (well, you can, but I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find out how)
Will you publish the source code? No, unless you can supply me with a convincing reason to do so.