How to disable Google search results in Russian language?

Question

My region is Ukraine so it is not a "mistake" that there are some relevant search results in Russian. However, can I filter out any results in Russian language anyway?

Answer 1

UPD (01/2023): Another great tool that I recently found for this purpose is SpyBuster. They have a Chrome extension to help filter out traffic coming from and to russia. P.S. I'm not affiliated with the developers.

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UPD (06/2022): All of the methods below started working again for me 🎉🎉🎉

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UPD (01/2022): Just found out that Google no longer accounts for - (minus) in lr and cr parameters. Only the third option with uBlacklist extension works now 😞

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I'm also from Ukraine, and I tried to tackle this problem in a few ways, so I just want to add a more detailed answer.

There are a few options:

1. lr=-lang_ru in search URL (as suggested by Alex)

Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=новости+россии&lr=-lang_ru

Check out Alex's answer to understand how to make it work in the browser.

This option answers the question but doesn't quite work for me in my day-to-day googling tasks.

2. cr=-countryRU in search URL

Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=новости+россии&cr=-countryRU

So say, I'm traveling to mountains in Georgia, and I want to see reviews from locals in the language I can understand, but with less influence from Russia. Or I'm googling international news regarding our region, and I like dw.com content.

This method works better for such cases and will filter out results coming from Russia but won't filter results in the Russian language.

3. Use uBlacklist extension to filter unwanted sites

This extension may help filter out specific URLs or sites by a URL pattern. For instance, *://*.ru/* will filter out all .ru websites.

It is also helpful in other cases not relevant to the question, and you can block specific websites right from Google Search.

Day-to-day method that works for me

1. Use option #2 as the primary method
2. Google in Ukrainian when you expect Ukrainian results and google in Russian for results in Russian with less influence on the topic coming from Russia.
3. Use uBlacklist from option #3 to filter out specific Russian international websites (e.g. rt.com).
4. When you actually need results from Russia, open up a search in an incognito tab.

This way works perfectly for me, and it also teaches Google what the relevant results are, so it gets better and better.

The only thing I left to figure out is how to filter videos and media shown on the respective sections and coming from popular media aggregators like YouTube.

Answer 2

This does not work any more.

The easiest way is to add lr=-lang_ru parameter to the search url. E.g. in Google Chrome:

1. Go to settings->search engine->manage search engines.

2. Click "add".

3. Put any name you want.

4. Put any keyword you want.

5. Use this for "url":

   {google:baseURL}search?lr=-lang_ru&q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:iOSSearchLanguage}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}
   

6. Make your new search engine default.

Replace "lang_ru" with any language you like to exclude.

Should work pretty much the same way for other browsers. Something like

https://google.com/?lr=-lang_ru

or

https://google.com/?other_parameter=other_value&lr=-lang_ru

should work fine most of the time.