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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?

#301

Post by skinkestek »

tekstar wrote: post #123
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…

Maybe some PM realized: Worse search results -> more Google searches -> more ad views

I don't think it is a PM. Googlers are generally nice.

I think it is a second level machine learning system that has gone haywire and nobody knows how to fix it, or they lost the keys, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797 for a real life (or not : ) story.

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

#302

Post by skinkestek »

rhdunn wrote: post #294
MrWiffles wrote: post #187

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. 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 so…

> he 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.

I interviewed with a 3 or so person company that did just that I think.

That was over a decade ago.

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

#303

Post by skinkestek »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #135
vadfa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it legally a good idea for Google to go and blacklist individual sites?

They killed off the Wikipedia clones that way. It's funny that they haven't come back even though the SO clones do the exact same thing.

I guess Wikipedia kind of got their rampant deletionism under control while Stack Exchange did not?

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

#304

Post by skinkestek »

tmikaeld wrote: post #297
freediver wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a counterpoint, in my world search is a close third after my development toolchain and my browser so I would find it reasonable to pay - given that I get better service from the paid service.

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

#305

Post by dgb23 »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #94
dgb23 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically.

> That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically. Google is the goto search engine today, the competition is virtually non-existant, so they don't have to compete anymore. Hence the quality of their search engine going down hill…

But that's pretty much how Google pushed out the then popular search engines: with search quality and a minimalist UI. It would be irrational for them to stray away too much from that quality focus.

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

#306

Post by dgb23 »

_lqaf wrote: post #80
dgb23 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically.

Extrapolating from an employee's feelings to the behavior of a huge public company is a terrible way to model reality.

That's not what I did. I was implying that those who have a stake in Google's success also have a stake in their search quality.

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

#308

Post by 6510 »

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…

Wikipedia is a good example. Google considers it a high value website (less so than before but still) while it only has a single article about each topic. Other projects have entire websites dedicated to the single topic, products, experts on staff, live support. I presented as an example to some google engineers the wp page on suicide that explains popular ways of doing it vs dedicated prevention projects. Today (for me) it ranks the topic: 1-3) news articles, 4) world health organization statistics, 5) wikipedia, 6) Suicide prevention.

ABC news, the NYT, WP and the WHO are considered high profile but the topic is not their area of expertise. Non of them would consider themselves the go-to place for people searching for it.

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

#309

Post by BeFlatXIII »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #259
ahepp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content I want already exists. It’s provided for no charge on stackoverflow, reddit, Wikipedia, cppreference, and a handful of other high quality sources. All of which do not charge users a fee, most of which obtain the content from users in the first place. So as far as I see it, the problem is not that the content is uneconomical to produce. The problem is that searching doesn’t discover the content I want. It…

Precisely. For me, the value in paying for a course or a book is not that they produce this knowledge, but that they collate it, filter through subject matter experience they already have to remove misleading additions, and add in any missing parts that may take a long time to grasp without a "Eureka!"-inducing explanation.

The service worth paying for is turning the collection of facts into usable information.

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

#310

Post by brainlessdev »

Plugging my own FF/Chrome browser extension that lets you add domains you want to block and will simply prepend matching text links with an angry emoji and prompt you to confirm whether you want to visit the page or not:

https://github.com/fnune/nay

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