The answer is, if someone can make money by doing something shitty but not illegal, they will do it.
Almost everything on the web is some scheme to put ads in your face so someone can make some money.
Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
31–40 of 323 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#32Really 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
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#33If I recall the Stackoverflow dataset is open source or at least made available to download so I assume all these sites just download that information regularly.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#34My 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What's worse is most of the results are outdated so you're looking at web-scraped API docs for Rails 3 or something.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.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#35Sites that do auto translate of original SO threads and pretend that it's their original content are the worst. Google sometimes prefers to give me that results instead of the actual SO thread because I'm not in English-speaking country. I have to waste some time to understand that it's just stolen SO thread. And it's not even that useful because some of them AUTO TRANSLATE CODE.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#36I 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...
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#37Is it bad that I've actually found my answer on some of these sites haha. But yeah, they're pretty low quality in general.
Yes; if the content were original or the different context was increasing discoverability, that’d be ok, but the duplicates of content posted elsewhere almost always just obscures the original, better post with better context and real users to follow up with.
I’ve googled things and gotten an answer pop up from one of these types of sites too/not saying its something to beat yourself up about, but if you’re playing devil’s advocate and suggesting there’s discoverability value added outweighing the other value lost, I disagree.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#38The 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?
Because Google is not interested in serving the best possible search results but rather in serving those that will make them the most money.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#39I spoke to a VP at google in 2006 in london and discussed using a combination of curation and entropy to flush out duplicates. He seemed pretty excited by the idea but I don't think anything materialized. Which is another way of saying this is not new - in those days these sites were copying newsgroups too.
Re: Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
#40As others have said: SO content is ripped-off (poorly) and mirrored. The page games Google's algorithm and shows up as a 'legit' result. Probably more complex than simple keyword stuffing, which isn't supposed to work these days..
I don't understand how these sites rank so highly though, they can't get much organic traffic at all. Most people who click on them will bounce immediately.