Really ticks me off that Google allows itself to be so easily gamed, it's your core business for christ's sake.
Search hasn't been Google core business for decades, they're into selling advertisement spaces
Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
131–140 of 323 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#132I believe Google have hit a sweet spot (for them) where they can keep you browsing a specific topic for a long time while still showing you mildly interesting results. Since the results are consistently on topic, you are shown ads that are interesting to you time and time again, which results in a lot of clicks and a lot of revenue.
I really hope that is not true but I guess if you are optimizing for a metric then that could make sense.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#133Somewhat 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.
The other day, I searched for something and got a whole HN thread copied to some crap site but it had just enough veneer to seem legit. I figured it out when I searched for something from that thread and found the actual original HN thread that had way more context. Google has been good to me overall, but in the past few weeks I've really noticed the SEO spam, and I'm not sure what to do about it so that I don't find those dodgy sites. I think Google search is a marvel of modern software, but I'm a firm believer that their advertising business has warped their other products in a negative way, though I'm not the person to suggest a fix.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Change the flag button on this post to censor and I bet people wouldn’t click it. But people want some level of censorship, so long as they convince themselves they’re not against free speech.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#135Earlier 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?
They killed off the Wikipedia clones that way. It's funny that they haven't come back even though the SO clones do the exact same thing.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#136For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - The…
Who is the offender?
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#137Just 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?
IMO it is a legitimately useful site, but strictly for beginners, and probably only for html/css. It teaches you the basics and has the sandbox to test things out. It's fine, just not what you want to see when you're looking for actual documentation.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
They seem to keep giving more and more confidence in their language semantic ai. Quoted words in the search should return only pages with that actually on the page. That used to work. Now it often shows pages that don't contain it all, not in the search results page itself, nor on the page when you go there. So you'd think it just ignored the quoted text and gave me results without it instead, right? Wrong. Removing…
Google Search has been going downhill _fast_ over the past 5 years or so. Since it's probably incompetence rather than malice, what the heck is going on at Google Search? It seems to me the "let's use AI for everything" camp has taken over the entire place even though it's making Search worse than it ever was. And please spare me the excuse that now Google can answer questions. It can't, it just answers with snippets…
>It can't, it just answers with snippets extracted from websites it deems relevant, and often the answer is flat out wrong or irrelevant.
I recently searched the name of a YouTuber I was watching, the top "People also ask" suggestion was "Is [name of youtuber] married?"
I didn't particularly care but clicked out of curiosity. It expanded to show a snippet from an old (1980s) NY Times article about a completely different person getting married long before this particular person was even born.
Google AI using other companies' content to provide wrong answers to questions I didn't even ask... That says it all.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But that's not censorship. Google is not a government, and no one's speech is being suppressed by filtering out literal copies of something and leaving the original.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#140Somewhat 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.
I have the Algolia HN search bookmarked. For specific types of searches I go straight to that