Rules

ClearURLs implemented the rule to remove the si attribute on November 5th[1]. I think a better approach though is to whitelist allowed attributes rather than blacklist disallowed attributes. For example, if you get a URL starting "https://www.youtube.com/watch?" then the only allowed attributes are v, t, etc and everything else would be stripped. [1] https://github.com/ClearURLs/Rules/commit/f4d52da5902640d4d0...

I like this idea. I've been using a bit of Ruby wrapped into my shell to remove Facebook's tracking from links[1] but it's nice to have so many in one place that we all can contribute to. It seems the interesting bit (for me) is in the Rules[2] repo. [1] https://gist.github.com/yb66/d39109df620ab1db2a46c943111c31d... [2] https://github.com/ClearURLs/Rules

Yep, that's kind of the main problem :) Hence the need for some manual curation. (e.g. ClearURLs seems to do it here https://github.com/ClearURLs/Rules/blob/master/data.json) For 80% of sites just throwing away the query parameters work, for the rest sadly it's necessary to do more sophisticated normalizing. I'm also thinking that it might be possible by some simple machine learning, by looking at the corpus of existing URLs. E.g. if a human looks at a corpus of different URLs they would more or less guess what is useful, and what's tracking garbage, so perhaps it's possible to automate it with a high accuracy? Then, I also feel if it's paired with some UI to allow the user to 'fix' the algorithm for entity extraction (e.g. by pointing at the 'relevant' parts of the URL), it would already be good enough for the user -- they would fix the