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

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

#261

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 2:51 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #179

kristiandupont wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. Google has absolutely dropped the ball - I'm not saying that it's easy to algorithmically rank good/bad content, but they're not even trying. A stop-gap solution would be to simply penalize anything with ads. Legitimate websites will still have enough "SEO juice" (for the lack of a better term) to offset the penalty, but brand new copycats with otherwise no inbound links to them from other legitimate webs…

Well, quite. Why would a company that makes its money selling ads penalise sites that show its ads?

And when you get to that state, you've pretty much turned the entire web into content marketing for your ad sales business.

So - of course search quality suffers. Search quality is not the point.

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

#262

Post by jppope » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

Just putting this out there... try brave search. The best answers from stackoverflow etc are all snippets and their results are getting better and better every day. I got sick of google after they made the BERT update. Really happy I switched (except for google maps data. google is still winning that game)

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

#263

Post by ellis0n » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

- 1990 no big data, no data, google indexing a porn and no ads and black hack market, no open source code, no seo articles, no market, bbs only - $

- 2000 censorship, business, big data and ads ads - $$

- 2010 code learning projects, quora, reddit, iphone, spam indexing and seo ads ads ads ads - $$$

- 2020 ai indexing everywhere, no-code indexing and code is a porn of no-code now so ads and ads ads ads seo seo seo - $$$$$$

- 2030 profit $googleplex?

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

#264

Post by intrasight » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #231

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe books are too low density. Like the “quantity of information” per amount of words is lower than a blog post for example. I dunno, I’m not really a reading type but I do own programming-related books. It’s the only type of book I own. I learned a lot from books like The Clean Coder, The Pragmatic Programmer and some 90’s book about Design Patterns with c++ examples and I don’t even write c++

Good programming books are some of the highest information density of any writing you can find. College professors tend to prefer the lower density versions which might be biasing people.

Some of the highest, but nothing like quantum mechanics, where my head explodes at page 2.

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

#265

Post by JohnBooty » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

ancientworldnow wrote: post #236

notJim wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hide sites by domain This gives me the idea to build a search engine that only contains content from domains that have been vouched for. Basically, you'd have an upvote/downvote system for the domains, perhaps with some walls to make sure only trusted users can upvote/downvote. It seems like in practice, many people do this anyway. This could be the best of both worlds between directories and search engines.

You don't need an upvote/downvote. If someone searches for X and clicks on results you just record when they stop trying sites or new search terms as you can assume the query has been answered. Reward that site. Most of them are already doing this in some form.

This is what Google already does, does it not? Why else would they be recording outbound clicks?

Unfortunately, this doesn't entirely solve the problem. Counting clicks doesn't work because you don't know if the result was truly worthwhile or if the user was just duped by clickbait.

As you say, clicking when they stop trying sites is better, but I don't know how good that signal to noise ratio is. A low-quality site might answer my question, sort of, perhaps in the minimal way that gets me to stop searching. But perhaps it wouldn't answer it nearly as well as a high-quality site that would really illuminate and explain things and lead to more useful information for me to explore. Both those scenarios would look identical to the click-tracking code of the search engine.

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

#266

Post by donmcronald » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:31 AM UTC

jetrink wrote: post #52

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...

I wish Google would add that feature natively. Google could even use it to help detect spam sites.

They used to have personal blocklist [1] and blocking garbage domains actually had an impact on search results.

1. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...

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

#267

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

abakker wrote: post #238

I mean, while we're at it, can we get rid of blogspam? Try googling for instructions for installing cellulose insulation. It takes AGES to find a site that isn't just garbage vague content. It should be possible to detect and demote this stuff. it is so obvious.

I find that for instructions in how to do common mechanical tasks, searching on YouTube is effective. There are lots of carpenters, mechanics, electricians, etc. who want to tell us the best way to do something.

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

#268

Post by sgerenser » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:50 AM UTC

lykahb wrote: post #158

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.

Yep, just try searching for “Best ” nothing but fake review sites stuffed with Amazon affiliate links.

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

#269

Post by mtoddsmith » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:55 AM UTC

stackoverflow.com doesn't have google ads. Those copy sites do. What is google's motive to fix that?

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

#270

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 3:57 AM UTC

throwamon wrote: post #250

slownews45 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is a gimmick. They claim to be running their own search engine, never checked out for me. More covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817576 Anyone seeing them crawling your site? Is bing the best alternative? I've seen some pretty compelling evidence DDG copies / uses / has a deal with bing.

You don't need to search for "compelling evidence", it's not like they're hiding it from you. https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

[deleted]