Quick one today. I got sick of searching for programming questions and seeing AI-generated scraped-from-stackoverflow click farm trash polluting the results, and I happen to use a personal SearXNG instance that no client-side blacklist extension on the planet is gonna support, so I went looking to see if I could blacklist them in SearXNG for like the eighth time and finally found a way using the hostname replace plugin. So here's that, because I didn't find this feature documented officially anywhere bar an [issue](https://github.com/searxng/searxng/discussions/970) on the Github repo.

## How to do it

First, open up your instance's config file. If you installed it directly like I did, that'll probably be `/etc/searxng/settings.yml`. If you used Docker, god help you. Anyway, find the `enabled_plugins:` section and uncomment the entry for `'Hostname replace'`, then uncomment the line `hostname_replace:` just below it. Under there you'll put your blocks:

<p class="codetitle">/etc/searxng/settings.yml</p>

```
enabled_plugins:
  - 'Hostname replace'
hostname_replace:
  '(.*\.)?codegrepper\.com': false
  '(.*\.)?geeksforgeeks\.org': false
```

Then restart SearXNG:

```
service uwsgi restart searxng
```