depreference

D2E1P3R1E1F4E1R1E1N1C3E1

verb

To cause something to stop being preferred by a search engine algorithm.

Scrabble 20

Meanings

verbdepreference (third-person singular simple present depreferences, present participle depreferencing, simple past and past participle depreferenced)

present singular third person depreferences · participle present depreferencing · participle past depreferenced · past depreferenced

  1. To cause something to stop being preferred by a search engine algorithm.

    In reality though, the circumstances for the scenario of blocking or 'depreferencing' a malicious Web page are different.

    2015 August, Huw Fryer, Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Tim Chown, “Malicious web pages: What if hosting providers could actually do something…”, in Computer Law & Security Review, volume 31, number 4, Amsterdam: Elsevier, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 502
    3 more examples

    We predict from this experiment that depreferencing short-term routes would have little negative impact in practice, as most affected routes are misconfigured, non-optimal routes discovered during convergence, or attacks.

    2008 October 23, Josh Karlin, Stephanie Forrest, Jennifer Rexford, “Autonomous security for autonomous systems”, in Computer Networks, volume 52, number 15, Amsterdam: Elsevier, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 2916

    In a related intervention, Google has successfully pushed ad-filled sites down the results by changes to its search-ranking algorithm, suggesting that a similar effort to depreference malware-infected sites is technically feasible.

    2012 September 18, Benjamin Edwards, Tyler Moore, George Stelle, Steven Hofmeyr, Stephanie Forrest, “Beyond the blacklist: modeling malware spread and the effect of interventions”, in NSPW '12: Proceedings of the 2012 New Security Paradigms Workshop, New York, N.Y.: Association for Computing Machinery, →DOI, →ISBN, page 61

    Tiktok^([sic]) won't just starve performers of the "free" attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them.

    2023 January 21, Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok's^([sic]) enshittification”, in Pluralistic, archived from the original on 19 Apr 2023

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

depreference. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/depreference

MLA

“depreference.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/depreference. Accessed November 2, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “depreference,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/depreference.

Source: depreference on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.