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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?

#21

Post by bellyfullofbac »

endofreach wrote: post #10

Well, as i wrote i understand that they try to monetize it. But: why the sudden explosion? I feel there is more of these sites going live regularly. Many times they make up 80% of the first pages on search results, just repeating the SO threads listed before. So it‘s really getting difficult. Something must be done…

Maybe someone figured out The Google Algorithm (TM/all hail the algorithm...) is allowing source code on dodgy sites, so they've created and marketed to spammers a script/bot to create these kinds of sites (or all the sites just belong to them) to farm that ad money.

A bit like how when "hoverboards" got popular, Chinese factories started churning them. And then when fidget spinners happened, same thing: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/how-to-...

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

#23

Post by jjallen »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #20
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.

Desktop web search is probably less the core business these days than making search work well on phones/mobile devices with specific applications, such as Maps, etc.

Why would they do that though? Why would they show you a low quality result if there was a better one available? I have pondered some of these sites as well. I think the answer is that they are actually helpful to some people.

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

#24

Post by beefield »

dmortin wrote: post #14

Search spam sites can be reported to google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

Quoting: "While Google does not use these reports to take direct action against violations"

Given e.g. pinterest in the google results, I find it difficult to imagine as sure way to waste your time uselessly than to report SEO spam sites to google. It is obvious they do not care the slightest bit.

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

#25

Post by mypastself »

The biggest problem is that they waste your time even when the content is ostensibly helpful, since the search result is usually listed after the Stack Overflow page it crawled from anyway. Each click steals a few seconds of developers’ time, which adds up, given how frequently these types of results pop up on Google search lately. That makes them worse than useless, they actively subtract value.

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

#26

Post by lozenge »

endofreach wrote: post #10

Well, as i wrote i understand that they try to monetize it. But: why the sudden explosion? I feel there is more of these sites going live regularly. Many times they make up 80% of the first pages on search results, just repeating the SO threads listed before. So it‘s really getting difficult. Something must be done…

Maybe these sites share some code? If you've already captured 2% of searches with one site, why not capture 1.5+1.5=3% of searches by running two sites.

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

#27

Post by nickthesick »

jjallen wrote: post #23
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop web search is probably less the core business these days than making search work well on phones/mobile devices with specific applications, such as Maps, etc.

Why would they do that though? Why would they show you a low quality result if there was a better one available? I have pondered some of these sites as well. I think the answer is that they are actually helpful to some people.

I don't think they track 'quality' they just see people clicking and use that as a proxy for 'quality'. (Quoted because what does quality even mean?)

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

#29

Post by didericis »

brianwawok wrote: post #2

It’s an easy way to make money. Scrape a popular site like Stack overflow or Wikipedia and add a bunch of advertisements. One of the many ways that scum ruin the web.

Wonder if there’s any way to get advertisers to veto scraped content sites. Not really in their incentive to boycott eyeballs, but if advertisers were actively avoiding those sites, it’d dry up the incentive to make them.

This could backfire, but fining advertisers that show up on those sites might work. The difficulty would be all the claim verification and process of determining what exactly is a “scraped site”, and backfire scenario could be another hurdle for non established sites/more centralization of content. But if you targeted the advertisers rather than the sites themselves, the advertising networks would be incentivized to do that identification themselves.

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

#30

Post by pixelgeek »

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...

If you are using Safari, the DevonAgent app[1] that was linked to in another thread also has a denylist feature

[1]:https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent

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