Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 323 posts

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

#181

Post by testudovictoria »

stevesimmons wrote: post #65
Rastonbury wrote: post #60

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.

> they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight Google clearly isn't even trying. So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn't a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them. Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

> Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

I assume they're optimizing for the most common denominator: standard, non-power users. Early search didn't return great results for human-like questions such as What are the wavelengths of the colors on the visible spectrum? The result might be within the first two pages, but that query had too many irrelevant search terms. A better query would have been wavelengths color visible spectrum. That query only has the necessary key terms. Sometimes queries required the user to know search operators (e.g. exact match, date range, synonyms) just to get relevant results.

The average person probably didn't know that early searches gave better results when constructed in the second way. Google changed search to adapt to how normal people search. Now the human-like query will return good results. Combine that with locales, search history, and personal interests, even the most basic user can get worthwhile results from asking Google question. The cost is that power users who understand operators and the power of key terms get less relevant results but likely still correct.

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

#182

Post by spiralx »

_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.

This whole topic is extrapolating from people's feelings to the behaviour of a huge public company. I've not seen a single piece of actual data anywhere so far.

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

#184

Post by projproj »

hnarn wrote: post #175
projproj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out tomdn.com. I created it to make it easier to get to MDN. E.g., instead of googling array.map, just type tomdn.com?array.map. It will take you straight to MDN docs on Array.prototype.map. Other things work as well, like tomdn.com?object.keys, tomdn.com?css.color, tomdn.com?htmlel.button, etc. If there is a pattern it doesn't recognize, you end up on the MDN search results page. edit: More info. about how it…

What value does this provide over simply Googling or DDG'ing "array.map mdn"? It's shorter and the first result for me is (unsurprisingly) MDN on both, and I don't have to run my searches through an unknown third party. DDG also has !bangs for this specific purpose and !mdn does, as expected, lead you to MDN.

Valid questions. I just think it's faster. One action on tomdn.com instead of 1. DDG "array.map mdn", 2. Find MDN result (usually first), 3. Click result, 4. See docs.

Bangs are great, just shorter again to use tomdn.com: - `!mdn array.map` leads me to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=array.map, which I have to scan the results and click on. - tomdn.com?array.map leads me to the exact page in the docs. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Javascript/Refe...

This may or may not be valuable, but I like saving the extra steps for something I do many times a week. Basically this calculation (https://xkcd.com/1205/) works out for me + the fun of working on a new project.

edit: >I don't have to run my searches through an unknown third party

Very sympathetic to this concern. Feel free to host yourself -- it's a single html file. https://github.com/tayler/tomdn

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

#185

Post by MrWiffles »

kristiandupont wrote: post #77
MrWiffles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.

Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so cocky as to think I have any idea what Google is fighting. There are a lot of very smart people from all over the world putting everything they have into getting to the top of that site. It's not a trivial task for them.

Consider it from a management/budgetary point of view. Super smart people? Oh hell yeah, and I don't fault them for this one bit. But bean counters? Why the hell invest in hiring those people, or budgeting for search quality improvements, when you have essentially no competition to speak of? Makes more sense to put those same smart people on projects that correlate people's activities outside of Google with activities they can observe either directly or indirectly to create a more wholistic picture of the consumer for advertisers. Those are much harder problems to solve, especially now that the public is finally becoming slowly more aware of the massive abuses of privacy the bean counters like I described above have been pushing for years.

At the end of the day Google doesn't exist for the good of the public, they exist to return the highest possible investment for shareholders. It's literally the opposite of their job to improve search quality when competition doesn't force them to (because investors see that as a waste of money that could have been spent on further eroding people's privacy to enable higher and higher ad revenues.)

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

#186

Post by leephillips »

enobrev wrote: post #75
leephillips wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still do "-site:spam.com".

For sure! Thanks for the reminder. There was a point (as you may know) when the domains were saved into your profile, so you didn't have to add it.

I didn’t know.

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

#187

Post by MrWiffles »

rhdunn wrote: post #85
MrWiffles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.

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 check for similarities.

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

#188

Post by jrumbut »

nunez wrote: post #178
jrumbut wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've just punted and begun searching SO and Github directly. One thing Google has gotten really good at lately is knowing that when I search for "John Smith" I mean John Smith the baseball player not the video game character or vice-versa.

you can also add 'site:github.com' or 'site:stackoverflow.com' to your search

It's not as good, especially for Github.

GH also breaks down the results into types which is very helpful when you only want code or are looking for documentation or discussion.

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

#189

Post by rafale »

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

Good point. Users only know about Google at this point. And won't even consider another search engine.
Post reply on HN