Manually Declutter a Web Page

With so many people and companies trying to monetize the web, many pages we visit are overloaded with ads and clickbait links to drive traffic to other sites. Not only is it annoying to look at online, but also adds junk data to our databases when we clip these pages into DEVONthink. Our browser extension, Clip to DEVONthink, has an option to use a clutter-free layout. This does its best to extract the article from the current page. But what about pages you may have already clipped?

Double-click a clipped web archive or HTML file to open it in its own window. Then make a selection of undesirable content and press the ⌫ Backspace key. Voila, the content is gone.

Two things to note:

• The selection is dependent on the underlying construction of the page, so you have to pay attention to what you’re selecting.
• This does not remove the underlying JavaScript scripts, analytics, etc. However, it should not affect search or classification. But, for some sites, it may mean you may have to do a bit of work in the internals to stop the page from loading new data.