Introducing Surfward

4/27/2025

Introducing Surfward

I built Surfward when my search sessions started feeling like rummaging through a junk drawer. Typing “best coffee grinder” surfaced the same recycled listicles, thin affiliate blogs, and Pinterest scrapes—pages that answered nothing except how to game an algorithm.

What I wanted was straightforward: a way to hide domains I didn’t trust and keep them hidden. Surfward grew from that need.

The problem that pushed me over the edge

Search engines feel like the optimize for who pays the most, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. I kept landing on sites that existed only to harvest clicks. Manually sifting through the clutter burned time and focus. Searching for reviews shouldn’t be websites that aggregate reviews from Amazon (which probably are mostly fake anyways), masking the fact that they are just affiliates that add no value over just going to Amazon on my own.

What Surfward does

Maintained blocklists. Baseline lists of known spam and copy‑cat domains and other categories that are updated regularly.

Toggle those lists in a simple extension. Don’t want to see certain stuff, just toggle it.

Instant page cleanup. Results are just removed from the DOM—no manual refresh needed.

Optional offline mode. Keep all processing on‑device if you prefer privacy over automatic list updates.

Upcoming items. Full‑site blockouts that apply to every tab, shared community lists, and better visual cues for affiliate networks.

Everyday use

Product research. I search for reviews for different products. Surfward automatically removes repeat offenders from the baseline blocklist. The remaining links are from publishers that I can trust.

Why this approach helps

Fewer distractions. Each block is a small boundary that preserves attention. Over time, the personal list reflects my own quality threshold rather than someone else’s ranking model.

Better trust signals. When a questionable site disappears permanently, subsequent searches surface sources with clear provenance—forums, academic posts, original reviews.

Influence of existing blockers

I took cues from community favourites like uBlock Origin and the uBlocklist extension. Both show how silencing entire domains can instantly clean a results page. The downside: Chrome’s Manifest V3 has limits on static filtering rules.

Surfward avoids that ceiling by storing the expansive lists on a privacy‑respecting server. The extension fetches only the rules as it needs, never shipping your browsing history out. Prefer maximum isolation? Flip Offline Mode and manage a private list that lives entirely in your browser—same controls, zero network calls.

This approach keeps the blacklist effectively limitless while preserving speed and user privacy.

Roadmap

Assemble your own hyper-targeted blocklists or follow proven sets, with support for all leading blocklist formats.

Get a quick read on a domain’s reputation and see if others have flagged it as junk.

More Browsers, Devices & Search Engines

Current preview status

Surfward is in early public preview. Features may change or break while the core mechanics settle. If you prefer stability, wait for a later release. If you don’t mind the occasional rough edge, install the extension and let me know where it trips up.

First‑time suggestion

Install Surfward, run a standard search, and block the first domain that feels wrong. Notice how the results reshape themselves. Repeat daily for a week; by then your searches should feel noticeably cleaner.

Surfward is my attempt to turn search back into a tool instead of a negotiation. If your results feel crowded, give it a try and see if it buys you a little clarity.