Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites? • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by riezebos » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

BizarroLand wrote: post #111

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...

To me, this comment made it sound like this "block site.etc" was a feature that Personal Blocklist has and uBlacklist doesn't, but if I open the ublacklist page the first screenshot of the extension shows "Block this site" next to each search result. Is the "block site.etc" in Personal Blocklist different from the one in uBlacklist?

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

#152

Post by nightfeather » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

Surely, even using an extension mainly to hide these stuffs.

Not only mirroring SO, also its siblings (like serverfault and askubuntu), and others like GitHub.

But the most annoying part is it keeps showing those mirrored and machine translated stuffs that offers little to none benefits to me and I'm already being forced trained enough to identify those at first glance.

Those even shows up when I'm already searching in other languages, ahrr.

edit: formatting

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

#153

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

I have this problem, and contrary to a lot of people I don't protect a lot of my PI from Google. It used to be Google was good at giving me stuff I wanted in ads, especially in gmail but they don't really anymore. You would think the more they knew about you they would be able to give you better results, so maybe a large scale test should be done - if Google knows your PI do you get better or worse results, or doesn't it matter at all.

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

#154

Post by dadboddilf2 » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

baeldung is the worst offender for java echosystem

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

#155

Post by jer0me » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #84

IMHO the biggest offender: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ They are making me insane with the modal login demand. I wonder if Google has downgraded the authoritative standing of StackOverflow?

I’ve just disabled JavaScript. The site works fine and the prompt never appears.

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

#156

Post by kikokikokiko » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 8:00 PM UTC

monkeybutton wrote: post #51

znpy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd blame gooogle more than the website, since google search results are generally getting worse and less relevant

Totally. This is a exactly what I was thinking about yesterday in the thread where someone was asking if Google results were getting worse. There's no reason the official docs for Python should be lower in the results than a shitty docs clone / spam site when searching for a common package/function in the standard library.

"There's no reason the official docs for Python should be lower in the results than a shitty docs clone"

If Google still used/respected the original page rank algo, the official docs would never be ranked lower than a spammy clone site. I just wish they reverted back to the "power of the crowd" algo, let each node vote with their links and reputation.

Nowadays I almost stopped using Google completely. I first noticed it with torrent/streaming censorship ~5 years ago, then the political/ideological censorship started to feel unbearable. I just want my search engine to show me the most relevant results BASED ON THE QUERY I SUBMITTED. No moral judgement crap.

My search stack nowadays is a mix o Bing, ddg, Yandex and if everything else failed, Google. It's a sad reality.

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

#157

Post by analog31 » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 8:02 PM UTC

Not related to coding, but I've noticed a lot of "best of" and "top ten" sites that appear to be of the same ilk, possibly automated, that just combine pictures and paragraphs ranging from ad copy to pure drivel. On topics ranging from bicycles to Linux distro's.

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

#158

Post by lykahb » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

The content farms get ahead of the organic results for many other areas too. Search for the programming questions isn't so bad. At least, the garbage is easy to recognize. Queries about products and services probably have the worst results.

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

#159

Post by cutemonster » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 8:07 PM UTC

lazyeye wrote: post #116

rhdunn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And probably they track content age too? Since they somehow can lookup by content (they can detect duplicated content), there's probably a date remembered too

So they could know if a code snippet was already X years old? And from where, originally. (Unless it got edited a lot but that's not the case here?)

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

#160

Post by BizarroLand » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 8:07 PM UTC

riezebos wrote: post #151

BizarroLand wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To me, this comment made it sound like this "block site.etc" was a feature that Personal Blocklist has and uBlacklist doesn't, but if I open the ublacklist page the first screenshot of the extension shows "Block this site" next to each search result. Is the "block site.etc" in Personal Blocklist different from the one in uBlacklist?

I haven't used uBlacklist, this was a solution I had independently stumbled into and I wanted to share it.

Based on the dialogue from the posters I was responding to, it seemed like uBlacklist would require some ongoing maintenance or memorization of input fields to work.

If it also offers a single-click permanent block of all sites in a domain from a Google search then that's just as cool, but that feature wasn't obvious from the conversation.