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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?

#41

Post by penteract »

didericis wrote: post #29
brianwawok wrote: post #2

It’s an easy way to make money. Scrape a popular site like Stack overflow or Wikipedia and add a bunch of advertisements. One of the many ways that scum ruin the web.

Wonder if there’s any way to get advertisers to veto scraped content sites. Not really in their incentive to boycott eyeballs, but if advertisers were actively avoiding those sites, it’d dry up the incentive to make them. This could backfire, but fining advertisers that show up on those sites might work. The difficulty would be all the claim verification and process of determining what exactly is a “scraped site”, an…

Contacting the advertisers to tell them that being shown on those sites makes you want to avoid their products might work, although that would involve not blocking the ads.

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

#42

Post by shever73 »

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...

That's a great tool, thanks for the recommendation. Pity it doesn't work with Ecosia's image search. I wrote my own extension to remove Pinterest from image results, and I've been thinking of extending it to block Instagram and Facebook too. I hate how these companies point their sewer pipe at search engines, so you get into a walled garden where you have to sign up to see the indexed content.

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

#43

Post by yumraj »

nickthesick wrote: post #28

Not only SO threads, I particularly hate the ones that mirror GitHub Issues. They don't even link back to the original thread, for Christ's sake!

And as I had mentioned in another thread, DDG so far ignores them, at least in my 1 case, but Google has those GitHub issues mirror sites as the first results. So they are clearly gaming Google SEO.

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

#45

Post by gompertz »

This is why I often search solutions directly on Stack Overflow, and not via Google. Or I add "site:stackoverlow.com" to my search. Generally SO has all I ever need... I find vendor forums to be a total wasteland for help (ie. Power BI forums) so don't need them as part of Google results.

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

#46

Post by tenebrisalietum »

jjallen wrote: post #23
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop web search is probably less the core business these days than making search work well on phones/mobile devices with specific applications, such as Maps, etc.

Why would they do that though? Why would they show you a low quality result if there was a better one available? I have pondered some of these sites as well. I think the answer is that they are actually helpful to some people.

Businesses are profit seeking entities run by human beings who tend to prefer conservation of energy. If a business goal can be met with X effort, X+1 effort is a waste and the resources can be directed elsewhere or kept as profit.

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

#48

Post by diveanon »

kristaps wrote: post #36

I wonder if Google as an organization cares enough to start a new spam crusade, but here's what happened the last time: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-se...

Based on the current state of GMail I don’t think anyone at Google gives a fuck about spam.

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

#49

Post by russh »

matt_heimer wrote: post #22
viktorcode wrote: post #13

The issue is actually pretty old. There was a time when Google introduced blacklisting of search results and revenue of those sites dived. Sadly, later Google rolled back the blacklist.

Any idea why they rolled it back?

It was effective and those affected were able to get the feature axed.

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

#50

Post by znpy »

yumraj wrote: post #43
nickthesick wrote: post #28

Not only SO threads, I particularly hate the ones that mirror GitHub Issues. They don't even link back to the original thread, for Christ's sake!

And as I had mentioned in another thread, DDG so far ignores them, at least in my 1 case, but Google has those GitHub issues mirror sites as the first results. So they are clearly gaming Google SEO.

I'd blame gooogle more than the website, since google search results are generally getting worse and less relevant
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