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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?

#141

Post by btown »

ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For 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…

There's an interesting dilemma here - if the algorithm were to favor "pages with lots of content alongside the exact-match phrase you're looking for" then it would incentivize content farms that combine lots of StackOverflow answers together. And if you favor the opposite, where there's less content alongside the exact-match phrase, you incentivize content farms that strip away content from StackOverflow before displaying it. Ideally, of course, you'd rely on site-level reputation - is Google just having trouble recognizing that these are using stolen content?

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

#142

Post by systemvoltage »

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.

Algolia should look into becoming the next search engine.

I want it to absolutely destroy Google/Microsoft.

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

#143

Post by SrslyJosh »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #135
vadfa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wikipedia clones probably got enough traffic to show up on someone's dashboard/report. SO clones are probably a small fraction of all traffic, even though they seem to show up in a large percentage of the searches we perform.

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

#144

Post by SrslyJosh »

labster wrote: post #134
briffle wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blacklisting by a private entity is not censorship. It's even sillier when you consider that what's being removed are copies and the original content is still there.

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

#145

Post by ziml77 »

yumraj wrote: post #43
nickthesick wrote: post #28

Not only SO threads, I particularly hate the ones that mirror GitHub Issues. They don't even link back to the original thread, for Christ's sake!

And as I had mentioned in another thread, DDG so far ignores them, at least in my 1 case, but Google has those GitHub issues mirror sites as the first results. So they are clearly gaming Google SEO.

My experience has been finding more garbage on DDG, not less. I ended up getting too tired of those results being above the good ones that I switched back to Google.

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

#146

Post by Clubber »

1_player wrote: post #86
BLanen wrote: post #82

Earlier 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…

>I just hope the ML/AI mania that has taken over these big tech companies proves to be a fad that just goes nowhere like it did in the 70s and we return to plain old algorithms and good software engineering.

It's now being used by law enforcement. Sponsored by an errant swat raid near you. Don't worry, they'll prosecute you anyway to cover their ass. Can't risk losing their pensions, ya know. /scared

https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/product-feature-artifici...

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

#147

Post by jonas21 »

All user-contributed content on Stack Overflow is under a CC-BY-SA license. So what the sites are doing is allowed under the license, as long as they're providing attribution.

Is it annoying? Sure. But neither Stack Overflow nor the authors of the content can do anything about it since they gave away a license to do it.

One of the things you have to accept when you release something under an open-source or Creative Commons license is that other people can take it and use it in ways that you don't like.

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

#148

Post by kilburn »

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?

> Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site?

It has. It is nowhere near the quality of MDN, but also nowhere nearly as bad as it used to be.

W3Schools has less information than MDN. This is bad for the experienced, but a relief for people who are entering the trade.

As an example, consider an inexperienced web developer that wants to do something when a button is clicked. They google for it and find these two pages:

- https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp . Right there in the middle of the page is an example snippet that will get the job done. If I scroll down I see other ways to do it, all of them fully contained (i.e.: I can copy-paste it to some website and they will work).

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/cli... . There's a table of things I don't understand (Bubbles? Cancellable?), two lengthy discussions about weird edge cases in some browsers, and (finally!) a single not-so-simple example that is not even enclosed in tags.

What website do you think they'll pick?

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

#149

Post by myohmy »

vlunkr wrote: post #137
bbarn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used it to learn CSS way back in the day and it still seems to be a good balance between too little and too much for the beginner, so I still send my newbies there.

Not surprised it shows higher than the actual spec. I think the HN community is just getting to the greybeard stage (I'm still cutting out grays), and this is our version of JUST READ THE MAN FILE

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

#150

Post by ScottWRobinson »

btown wrote: post #141
ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For 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…

There's an interesting dilemma here - if the algorithm were to favor "pages with lots of content alongside the exact-match phrase you're looking for" then it would incentivize content farms that combine lots of StackOverflow answers together. And if you favor the opposite, where there's less content alongside the exact-match phrase, you incentivize content farms that strip away content from StackOverflow before displ…

> is Google just having trouble recognizing that these are using stolen content?

It's very possible. In general Google will penalize you for duplicate content, but that might not apply to code snippets since code is often re-used within projects or between projects.

The code snippet sites also typically have 2 or more snippets on the same page. When combined, it might then look unique to Google since their algorithm probably can't understand code as well as it understands natural text. Just a guess

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