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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?

#201

Post by notJim »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #170
ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - The…

I wonder if we'll see a comeback of hand-curated directories of content? I feel like the "awesome list" trend is maybe the start of something there. I would be willing to pay an annual fee to have access to well-curated search results with all the clickbait, blogspam, etc. filtered out. Until then, I recommend uBlacklist[0], which allows you to hide sites by domain in the search results page for common search engines…

> hide sites by domain

This gives me the idea to build a search engine that only contains content from domains that have been vouched for. Basically, you'd have an upvote/downvote system for the domains, perhaps with some walls to make sure only trusted users can upvote/downvote. It seems like in practice, many people do this anyway. This could be the best of both worlds between directories and search engines.

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

#202

Post by andai »

ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - The…

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything

Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

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

#203

Post by striking »

projproj wrote: post #184
hnarn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. h…

`! mdn array.map` takes you right to MDN

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

#204

Post by slownews45 »

randomluck040 wrote: post #199
slownews45 wrote: post #197

Google search is going downhill in my experience. My question: What is the alternative?

I‘m using DDG most of the time but when I have to use Google hoping the results will be better, I try to specify words that need to be in there. However, the more niche your problems are, the less you will find.

DDG is a gimmick.

They claim to be running their own search engine, never checked out for me.

More covered here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817576

Anyone seeing them crawling your site?

Is bing the best alternative? I've seen some pretty compelling evidence DDG copies / uses / has a deal with bing.

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

#205

Post by Kiro »

Nextgrid wrote: post #179
kristiandupont wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. Google has absolutely dropped the ball - I'm not saying that it's easy to algorithmically rank good/bad content, but they're not even trying. A stop-gap solution would be to simply penalize anything with ads. Legitimate websites will still have enough "SEO juice" (for the lack of a better term) to offset the penalty, but brand new copycats with otherwise no inbound links to them from other legitimate webs…

How do you know Google is not already doing all those things? You said it yourself, you can't win them all and we're witnessing the result of that. If Google truly did nothing it would be an unimaginable chaos.

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

#206

Post by Kiro »

stevesimmons wrote: post #193
testudovictoria wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If Google actually used its search history, it would see I was a sw eng power user, and return the types of results that users like me want to see. Then again, I have been using Google Maps for 16 years and it still cannot show me distances in km rather than miles. A boolean setting ffs that I've had to manually switch probably a thousand times. If billions of dollars of AI R&D can't even figure that out...

Funny how people complain about Google tracking them and then get angry when they are not being tracked enough.

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

#207

Post by TheDudeMan »

andai wrote: post #202
ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - The…

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

It's hard to convince anyone to pay for anything.

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

#208

Post by john-tells-all »

andai wrote: post #202
ScottWRobinson wrote: post #129

For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - The…

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

I train programmers, and strongly recommend they buy books or do other types of money/time investment to make themselves better (and more highly-paid programmers).

They won't do it.

I've had multiple programmers literally shocked and avoid my outstretched book. Once I got a question, said "I just read the answer to this in this book right here"... and the programmer refused to read the book to answer his question.

I don't get it.

This, coupled with companies lack of investment in their expensive engineers, is mystifying.

None of the above has anything to do with the FSF.

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

#209

Post by Kiro »

nerdponx wrote: post #172
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...

It'd be pretty neat if DDG let you configure this as a setting. They don't have "accounts" as such, but they do provide users with a one-time password that lets you save and restore settings. Alternatively, if they at least supported "do not include" filters in regular searches, you could build a client that stored those kinds of search defaults locally. The best you can do now is strip out those results on the clien…

They can't do that since they are getting their results from Bing.
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