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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?

#271

Post by userbinator »

prox wrote: post #90
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.

I also a lot of strange domains (.it, .so) and tangential related domainnames. Clicking it gives a really weird content scraped jumble that seems AI generated. My malware extension also went on alert. And this is in the top ten in a search result!

I see tons of "non-standard" TLDs now, even in articles posted here, and I'm always wary of visiting them. To be perfectly honest, I tend to completely ignore TLDs with more than 3 characters.

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

#273

Post by krmboya »

andai wrote: post #202
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…

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

The Free Software Movement is for free as in free speech and not free as in free beer.

It's about freedom to access, modify and distribute the source code.

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

#275

Post by userbinator »

At least the SO clones will still probably have content that you can make use of in some way; what's worse is when you search for an error code and you get back tons of pages that don't even have the exact code you searched for, which seems to be increasingly common recently.

It also used to be the case that you could dig into the second, third, ... sometimes even 20-30 pages in and hit the jackpot. Now, the results are even less relevant there, you soon get to "the end", and if you change your query slightly and try again a few times to search harder for what you want, you'll get hit with the unsolvable CAPTCHA hellban.

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

#276

Post by endofreach »

austinhutch wrote: post #162

Here some of the sites that have gotten traction in my SERPs lately that I can't stand https://pretagteam.com/ https://www.codegrepper.com/ https://issueexplorer.com/ They are all scraping Stack Overflow / Github in some fashion

Pretagteam & codegrepper were actually the sites that made me explode & post this here…

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

#277

Post by userbinator »

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…

as it seemingly favors code snippets, exact-match phrases

If only... it seems like the search results have gotten far worse for exact-matching. I regularly search for part numbers and markings, somewhere where exact matches are pretty much the only thing I want, and I can clearly see the decline over the years as it starts including more and more results that don't even have the string I'm looking for.

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

#278

Post by MonaroVXR »

john-tells-all wrote: post #208
andai wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

I train programmers, and strongly recommend they buy books or do other types of money/time investment to make themselves better (and more highly-paid programmers). They won't do it. I've had multiple programmers literally shocked and avoid my outstretched book. Once I got a question, said "I just read the answer to this in this book right here"... and the programmer refused to read the book to answer his question. I…

Do you have some book recommendations for web development?

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

#279

Post by phil294 »

userbinator wrote: post #277
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…

as it seemingly favors code snippets, exact-match phrases If only... it seems like the search results have gotten far worse for exact-matching. I regularly search for part numbers and markings, somewhere where exact matches are pretty much the only thing I want, and I can clearly see the decline over the years as it starts including more and more results that don't even have the string I'm looking for.

...which even applies if you enclose the specific term with quotes. These used to help against unrelated results, but not so much anymore. I don't know why. Same thing with DDG and Bing.

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

#280

Post by 999900000999 »

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…

I pay for Interview Cake.

If you could create a site with both interview prep and quality code tips I'd pay for it.

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