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Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

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Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#111

Post by BizarroLand »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #18

uBlacklist is a great tool to block sites you don't want from showing up on your search results on google (and a couple others including bing and duckduckgo). It supports regular expressions as well, I use /pinterest\..*/ to block all pinterest-related content. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

There's also Personal Blocklist, which appends a small "block site.etc" under every google search result.

If there is a site that is clogging up your search results, just click it and it's gone.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/personal-bloc...

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#112

Post by gwittel »

stevesimmons wrote: post #65
Rastonbury wrote: post #60

Somewhat tangential but I believe Google Search is going downhill, they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight. Recently, I've had to append wiki/reddit/hn to queries I search for because everything near the top is shallow copied content marketing.

> they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight Google clearly isn't even trying. So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn't a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them. Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

Pretty much this. It’s likely down to the lack of incentives for leaders and line workers. Ie: search spam volume isn’t a measure by which search team performance is graded

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#113

Post by Hnaomyiph »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #64
pupppet wrote: post #9

Really ticks me off that Google allows itself to be so easily gamed, it's your core business for christ's sake.

We have to assume that Google devs see these crappy spammy code websites too on a daily basis, right? What's up with the incredibly strong programmer culture over there, gone already after 20 years? You'd think someone would take these weak search results personally...

As someone who knows a handful of devs and hear their near daily grievances of google, it seems like the culture over there has died and it’s just a bog standard Big Corp(tm) now. By how they describe it, a lot of the people, (but not all of course), who deeply care about the ‘craft’ of development have retired or moved onto more interesting roles at newer and more exciting companies and were replaced by people whose main driving force is climbing the corporate ladder at a FAANG. As a result the perf cycles/promotions seem to be heavily based on high impact projects/launches, leaving the “little things” like bad search results or other maintenance work forever on the back burner, because working on those things won’t get you a promotion/more money.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#115

Post by dvirsky »

One thing that makes SO an easy target for this is that they let you download all their data and you don't even need to crawl and scrape the content from the website. Just download a dump, put it in an database, slap an HTML template on top of it, splash a few ads, and boom.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#116

Post by lazyeye »

rhdunn wrote: post #85
MrWiffles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.

One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions. Related is if you have a lot of content from git repositories that are mirrored from different locations (GitHub, GitLab, etc.), all of which are showing the same content. Or if different sites are hosting versions of public domain texts. You don't want to dera…

Google knows instantly how much time you spend on a page and how quickly you return to the search results because it is a useless copy/paste page from SO.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#117

Post by kizer »

kristiandupont wrote: post #77
MrWiffles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.

Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so cocky as to think I have any idea what Google is fighting. There are a lot of very smart people from all over the world putting everything they have into getting to the top of that site. It's not a trivial task for them.

Fair point. But again, that would be less of an issue if there were like 3 or 4 big search engines with different algorithms, all changing and adapting on their own schedules. Would be harder to game the system then.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#118

Post by motoxpro »

kristiandupont wrote: post #77
MrWiffles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.

Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so cocky as to think I have any idea what Google is fighting. There are a lot of very smart people from all over the world putting everything they have into getting to the top of that site. It's not a trivial task for them.

You're so right. It's sad that even if you remove 99% of something, to the outside it looks like you are removing 0% because you have no reference.

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#119

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

bbarn wrote: post #102
shmde wrote: post #98

Just to chip in with a very minor annoyance, I hate how google puts up w3schools results above MDN for anything related to JS/HTML.

I've seen several developers google "w3schools someDomEvent" because they are conditioned by those search results. Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site?

Are you positive the first term wasn't prefixed by a hyphen-minus?

Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

#120

Post by briffle »

vadfa wrote: post #87
stevesimmons wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight Google clearly isn't even trying. So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn't a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them. Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

Is it legally a good idea for Google to go and blacklist individual sites?

Exactly, change the word blacklist to censor, and then it seems wrong.
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