HACKER Q&A
📣 johnpowell

Has anyone just blacklisted everything Google with a Pi-hole?


I would love to try it but I live with a lot of roommates and the carnage would be unimaginable.

I notice that nearly all the top permitted domains listed in the Pi-hole admin interface are Google related. I'm just wondering how much everything would fall apart if I just blacklisted all of them.

Has anyone tried? Is anyone willing to try and share the result?


  👤 WinonaRyder Accepted Answer ✓
I use a DIY DNS server as opposed to Pi-hole specifically, but I found that doing that broken sites at the most awkward times.

Imagine doing something on a site and then suddenly the it breaks... you realize why and maybe unblock something and refresh the page only to find out that you now need to enter a phone number (which Google won't accept, no matter what you do), because of your suspicious activity (looking at you Twitter, Paypal, YouTube).

Anyway... for the last several years I've worked around this by using multiple browsers and/profiles:

- Tor Browser for my usual HN, Reddit, YouTube lurking... stuff I don't need to log in for.

- One with almost no blocking (apart from the incognito mode) for banking, PayPal, etc.

- One for dev work... you get the idea.


👤 hos234
I just periodically update my host file with - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts which blocks most of the ad serving domains

gmail/youtube etc work fine