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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?

#281

Post by rodw »

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.

Funny, it was the "lots of internal linking" bit that felt wrong to me. Not that these low-quality sites don't do that, but I'm surprised to hear that the new algorithm rewards internal links. I'm certainly not a full-time SEO guy, but I happen to have or work with a few sites - some fairly established - that make extensive use of internal links for design/editorial reasons. As far as I can tell they are helpful for (a) user navigation and (b) getting search engines to discover/index the pages but I don't think I've seen any notable advantage in or even impact on ranking based on those internal links (whether in the body copy or in head/foot/side "navigation" areas).

Searching just now I do see some other sources making a similar claim, so maybe I'm just out of the loop. But in my cursory scan I haven't found much detail or real evidence beyond "google says they matter" either. I mean, that's not why those internal links were created in the first place, but it sure would be nice to get a ranking boost out of them too. I wonder what I'm doing wrong :)

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

#282

Post by rodw »

ScottWRobinson wrote: post #150
btown wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, while I imagine Google probably has (or at least easily could have) code-specific heuristics at play, it seems like it may be harder to reliably apply duplicate content penalties to source code listings, especially short code snippets.

Between the constrained syntax, literal keywords, standard APIs and common coding conventions it seems like even independently-authored source code listings will be superficially similar. Certainly the basic/naive markov-chain-style logic that works really well for detecting even small examples of plagiarism in natural language content isn't going to as effective on `public static void main(String[] args)` or whatever.

Obviously there are strategies that could distinguish superficial/boilerplate stuff from truly duplicated code, but between the volume of actual (and often legitimate) duplication on the internet and the (maybe?) low ROI for duplicate content penalties for code relative to other value metrics/signals, maybe this just isn't terribly important as a quality factor?

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

#283

Post by galaxyLogic »

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 don't know what is going on with Google but I thought their main idea is to give points to sites which other sites link to. Are these code-sites linking to each other perhaps?

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

#284

Post by earthboundkid »

JohnBooty wrote: post #265
ancientworldnow wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I click on link 1 then click on link 2 several minutes later, 1 probably sucked. The difficulty is if I click on 1 and then 2 quickly, it just means I’m opening a bunch of tabs proactively.

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

#285

Post by Agentlien »

Another thing I've noticed recently is that a lot of queries about computer graphics, especially tied to Unity's render pipelines, bring up what look like blog posts full of code snippets but the actual "article" seems nonsensical and impossible to follow. I suspect they are machine translated and they're really annoying.

edit: after doing a single Google search for "urp rendercontext" I found this: https://programmerall.com/article/71251053239/

Looking at it closely there seems to be some red thread and the images and code snippets do seem to follow a logical progression, but the text itself is a complete mess. I can tell it sometimes references things from the code snippets and hints at things I can see in the image, but it's certainly not informative.

Their site description says "Programmer All, we have been working hard to make a technical sharing website that all programmers love." I'm sorry, but I really don't.

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

#286

Post by galaxyLogic »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #222
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?

Most developers will rather spent 2 days to build something than pay $60 for something better.

A big part of programming is learning. You need to learn. It's not only about learning a programming language. Programming language is just a tool. What you need to learn is:

1. How to use that tool effectively

2. How to build better products with it.

You are never done learning those. And the best way to learn is to (at least try) to build it yourself. Therefore I think it makes sense for programmers to try to build it.

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

#287

Post by maks25 »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #283
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 don't know what is going on with Google but I thought their main idea is to give points to sites which other sites link to. Are these code-sites linking to each other perhaps?

They’re called PBNs or “private blog networks”. A bunch of low quality sites all backlinking to each other.

I don’t like the SEO industry very much.

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

#288

Post by yeuxardents »

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…

It reminds me of the scene from the original willy wonka from that era, where they are trying to use a computer to predict where the next winning ticket will be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZ2j9yK_NY

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

#289

Post by 3np »

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.

This can be somewhat alleviated by running searx and adding domains to a filter list. You can also merge results with DDG and other search engines.

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

#290

Post by phil294 »

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...

Do you have any subscription lists you would recommend? [1] is the only related information I could find. Would be great to expand this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994059

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