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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?

#291

Post by vegancap »

brootstrap wrote: post #126
vegancap wrote: post #11

I really hate these. Especially when I'm trying to figure something out and I'm struggling to find answers, I end up haplessly finding the exact same wrong answer on three different sites.

I've 100% noticed it in the past months. Have a new employee that i'm trying to train up a bit with python and googling has gotten more annoying. fucking codegrepper.com & shit. FUG EM . hilarious when you find the exact same snippet over and over. Even more hilarious those asswipes are probably making $$ (potentially lots) with all the stupid clicks n that.

Oh god yeah, I wish SO got better at blocking scrapers, I'm pretty sure services like CloudFlare have anti-scraping protection. They need killing off ASAP!

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

#292

Post by nobody9999 »

yumraj wrote: post #192
ziml77 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been finding more garbage on DDG, not less. I ended up getting too tired of those results being above the good ones that I switched back to Google.

Try this, the exact query I was referring to. I leave it to the reader to decide which is better.. The top 2 Google results are scrapped clones (or whatever they should be called) of the 1st result from DDG (Github issues #162 for docker-calibre-web) The closest Google comes in top 4 links is a link to the entire Github issues for docker-calibre-web DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=FakeUserAgentError+calibre-...…

Interestingly, as of 02 December 2021 ~0300 US/Eastern, this thread is the third entry in your Google search. It doesn't appear at all on the first page of the DDG results.

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

#293

Post by fho »

notJim wrote: post #201
charlesdaniels wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll see a comeback of hand-curated directories of content? I feel like the "awesome list" trend is maybe the start of something there. I would be willing to pay an annual fee to have access to well-curated search results with all the clickbait, blogspam, etc. filtered out. Until then, I recommend uBlacklist[0], which allows you to hide sites by domain in the search results page for common search engines…

> 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.

I don't think this would change a lot, you would probably raise big sites (Pinterest, Facebook) a lot higher in the rankings as the 99% non-programmers would vouch for them.

You could counter that somewhat by having a "people who liked X also like Y" mechanism, but that quickly brings you back to search bubbles.

In that sense Google probably should/could do a better job by profiling you and if you never click through to a page lower it in the rankings. Same with preferences, if I am mainly using a specific programming language and search for "how to do X" they could only give me results on that language.

In the end that will probably make my search results worse, as I am not only using one language ... and sometimes I actually click on Pinterest :-(

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

#294

Post by rhdunn »

MrWiffles wrote: post #187
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…

> 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. The core function of that is actually pretty simple: 1. Strip all X/HTML tags 2. Run `diff` Sure, it's not perfect, but an organization that pursues academic quantum computing research can sure as hell afford to run the results of the above against an AI to c…

The issue is not figuring out if site X has a copy of a page or text from site Y. The issue is how do you know which site is the source of the information. In other words, the technical bit is easy but determining what to do with that is hard. Especially if you don't want a lot of hard coded exceptions.

In the case of things like other sites copying from stack overflow, github, etc. you can figure out which is the source of the information.

Lets day you have decided to make github the source of that information, and derank any other sites that also have that information. As a result, you will derank gitlab for having git mirrors of projects, as the source will match that on github. You will also derank sites like lkml as that contains the commit message descriptions, and the patches will partially match content from the kernel source hosted on github.

Lets also say you've decided to make wikipedia and other wikimedia sites the source of information. Congratulations, you've now deranked project gutenberg for hosting the same public domain texts as wikimedia, along with other sites like the official sites for authors like Jack London. Plus any blog that includes portions of these to discuss or analyze them.

Do you want a blackbox AI making these decisions?

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

#295

Post by sph »

shuntress wrote: post #105
1_player wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just like pretty much every other thing online Google (search) is constantly in danger of being run over by people acting in bad-faith to game the system. Of course their actions have not been perfect but it is a mistake to say that their search would be better as a "plain old algorithm" no matter how well-engineered it is. I'm certain that search results would be worse than they are now if the algorithm was just "gr…

Eh, I don't know. There was spam but search was useful.

Now there's still spam, and search is useless.

Also, I don't think people remember how much interesting stuff is on the internet. There used to be tons of results from small sites of blogs which are still there, but not listed on Google anymore. Modern Google has made the internet incredibly smaller. Everything is still out there, hidden from our searches. It's like their algo has been tuned to favour silos, spam or content silos that is, to the detriment of the long tail of small, hobbyist websites with high signal-noise ratio.

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

#296

Post by nextaccountic »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #170
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 wonder if we'll see a comeback of hand-curated directories of content? I feel like the "awesome list" trend is maybe the start of something there. I would be willing to pay an annual fee to have access to well-curated search results with all the clickbait, blogspam, etc. filtered out. Until then, I recommend uBlacklist[0], which allows you to hide sites by domain in the search results page for common search engines…

The trouble is, how do you prevent Sybil attacks? The spammers might vote for their own sites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

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

#297

Post by tmikaeld »

freediver wrote: post #254
dorkwood wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I search "who gave away Anne Frank's hiding place?", Google confidently gives me the answer "Miep Gies". I don't know why Google would even suggest this -- Miep was one of Anne's helpers. Imagine all the other people out there having their names unfairly smeared by Google's algorithm.

Happy to report that Kagi Search (a newcomer and one of the three search engines that can answer questions like this) gave the right answer. Both Google and Bing got it wrong.

No way I'm going to pay 10$/mo for search cleaning (they're just a search proxy), if it was reasonably priced at something like 1$/mo I'd consider it.

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

#298

Post by rwmj »

I've noticed that Google Alerts for my open source projects have been useless for years. Full of snippet sites as well as outright scam sites which take code from SO or my blog or just mixed up tech words and repost it.

Here's the Google Alert from yesterday (scammy URLs redacted):

Guestmount qcow2 - Casino en ligne fiable It uses libguestfs for access to the guest filesystem, and FUSE (the ``filesystem in userspace'') to make it appear as a mountable device.

Stdin 1 libguestfs error usr bin supermin exited with error status 1 - Aritco Since libguestfs 1. sudo apt-get install libguestfs-tools mkdir sysroot # Just a test file. Supermin and Docker-Toolbox #14. DIF/DIX increases the ...

Edit Qcow2 Image - A-ONE HEALTH BRIDGE The libguestfs is a C library and a collection of tools on this library to create, view, access and modify virtual machine disk images in Linux. img

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

#299

Post by aryeshalev »

This reminds me Yahoo! Answers clones 10 years+ ago. To get traffic to website and cheat the search engine they would have index the Yahoo! answers website for specific niche category and create a garbage website with questions and answers not crediting the source and cramp the website with Ads everywhere to earn massive revenue.

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

#300

Post by skinkestek »

notJim wrote: post #201
charlesdaniels wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll see a comeback of hand-curated directories of content? I feel like the "awesome list" trend is maybe the start of something there. I would be willing to pay an annual fee to have access to well-curated search results with all the clickbait, blogspam, etc. filtered out. Until then, I recommend uBlacklist[0], which allows you to hide sites by domain in the search results page for common search engines…

> 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.

> This gives me the idea to build a search engine that only contains content from domains that have been vouched for.

Just giving us personal blocklists would help a lot.

Then if search engines realize most people block certain websites they could also let it affect ranking.

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