Leaving Google: Blocking Google Ads

I was somewhat conflicted about this one. Many of the blogs I read are ad-supported. Taking away their revenue by blocking Google’s ads seems like collateral damage. On the other hand, there are plenty of good alternatives that aren’t nearly as big-brother-ish as Google. So while I mean no harm to the great content providers out there, I’m opting out.

Doing so is simple, I just added a couple lines to my hosts file. To do that, fire up Terminal and:

sudo emacs /etc/hosts

You’ll have to type in your computer’s password. Then just add these lines to the bottom of the file that opens:

127.0.0.1  pagead.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1  pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Presto, all traffic that formerly went to Google’s ad servers gets redirected to your own box, and no more Google snooping. I suppose you could install some ad-blocking tool, but I only wanted to target Google, and this was easy enough.