Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by monkeybutton » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #50

yumraj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Totally. This is a exactly what I was thinking about yesterday in the thread where someone was asking if Google results were getting worse.

There's no reason the official docs for Python should be lower in the results than a shitty docs clone / spam site when searching for a common package/function in the standard library.

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

#52

Post by jetrink » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

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...

I wish Google would add that feature natively. Google could even use it to help detect spam sites.

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

#53

Post by johnchristopher » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

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!

Just found out about github clones today. It threw me off.

At least for SO you can get back to SO to search but github issues search engine is something else.

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

#54

Post by pricci » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

ljm wrote: post #34

My pet peeve is ApiDock, which has managed to SEO itself so high up the rankings when searching for anything connected to Ruby or Rails that it is actually quite difficult to get to the legitimate, official documentation. What's worse is most of the results are outdated so you're looking at web-scraped API docs for Rails 3 or something. Really frustrating.

And the site is so slooow for me.

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

#55

Post by hidden-spyder » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

An index of these sites will be helpful to mass blacklist them with the uBlacklist extension.

Anyone up for creating one so everyone can contribute to it?

The extension allows subscribing to blacklists via links, so a single txt file will be enough.

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

#56

Post by dehrmann » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

pupppet wrote: post #9

Really ticks me off that Google allows itself to be so easily gamed, it's your core business for christ's sake.

I used to work for a company that gamed Google like this, but with product search results (that were, themselves, CPC ads). The company got bought for scrap because Google got good at downranking their pages in search results and finally taking shopping seriously.

A lot has changed since then, but I doubt that Google has decided these kinds of content farms are suddenly OK. It should also give pause to people asking for "open ranking algorithms." Without some amount of secrecy, content farms will pop up for literally every keyword they can sell ads against, and they'll know how to rank more often rather than just blindly guessing.

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

#57

Post by nitrogen » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

nickthesick wrote: post #27

jjallen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think they track 'quality' they just see people clicking and use that as a proxy for 'quality'. (Quoted because what does quality even mean?)

I seem to recall reading that they (used to?) track abandonment of the search results page as a successful answer to your question from the embedded page snippets or info boxes. So if you get a search result page that's complete garbage and just give up, they increase the ranking of those sites.

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

#58

Post by dgb23 » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

pixelgeek wrote: post #32

pupppet wrote: post #9

Really ticks me off that Google allows itself to be so easily gamed, it's your core business for christ's sake.

No it isn't. Ads are their core business. Those crap sites almost all run ads from Google

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.

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

#59

Post by radiantttt » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

Maybe code snippets are "enriched" in these sites?

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

#60

Post by Rastonbury » Wed, Dec 01, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

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.