My job requires incessant google searches. I'm talking 1000's a day and they all involve shopping and product pages. Google's shopping thumbnails are very helpful and I use them constantly.
In short, Google's links are a riddled with redirect links and are a nightmare when combined with PiHole. I want to use extensive blocklists, including Wall3y's (spelling), and I haven't been able to locate a viable solution to what I'm looking to do.
Has anyone figured out how to do the following?
Google Search Result Redirection Links
Block all the unnecessary redirection pages entirely
Allow & only pass final destination URL's
I really, really, reallllly want to be able to utilize PiHole for my work. However, whitelisting all of those google ad pages will significantly impact PiHole's ability to do it's "thing" everywhere else.
TLDR:
I've tried Tapermonkey scripts & Chrome addons to extract redirection links from Google Search Results
Anyone who is able to help me will go down as the best person on the web and earn many brownie points in my book. I will be eternally grateful for a solution!
This is not something you can do with Pi-Hole. Pi-Hole is a domain blocker (it will either block or pass a specific domain), but does not look at the content of a URL and has no ability to parse a URL to remove unwanted redirects.
For this you would need a proxy that can inspect each URL, change it and then go to the web and get the changed URL.
Note that with more blocklists comes more required whitelist entries.
Most of the sponsored ads I see on the Google product search are served by www.googleadservices.com. If you whitelist that domain, these links should work for you. Are you seeing many other ad-serving domains?
I appreciate the responses, but my home network is fairly complex for what it is.
I have 5 VLANS, isolating devices with many rules in place to control things on a OCD-level.
I have one PiHole for my family's content - Vlans 2,3,4,5. I just created a second, hosted on a Debian VM, for my workstation's management VLAN, which houses all our network devices, Plex, printer and so on.
On my VLAN, I am using dns forwarding, dnsmasq & caching through my Edgerouter X, but really wanted to adopt PiHole adblocking. However, my Google Searches are priceless and time is money. I've gone as far as DNS Benchmarks, religiously clearing browser temp files, cookies, etc. and so forth. This was my next logical step.
Thanks though.
Do you have any other recommendations for sheer network speed & optimization? I need the fastest, most lean, mean fighting machine when it comes to web browsing.
Super late to the game, but I'm working on a similar issue and have a workaround that others may find useful.
There is a Firefox add-on called "Google search link fix" which stops google from altering the displayed link when you click sponsored entries. This stops the encapsulating URL which triggers the pi hole to sink the request and allows google sponsored ads to pass through unharmed.
There may be a chromium equivalent.
I have no affiliation to this app and do not warrant its safety or efficacy beyond that it actually works for me to solve this problem.
