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After reading your comment I realized that I have the exact same experience. I use Java and JS professionally and it's often a pain to find good information for

After reading your comment I realized that I have the exact same experience. I use Java and JS professionally and it's often a pain to find good information for specific issues. As a side interest, I've been using rust for several projects and find information significantly quicker. For Java I now rely mostly on some more reliable source for information that I tend to directly search rather than go through Google/DDG. Baeldung and Mkyong come to mind. Surprisingly, some discord groups have also become my go to source for help.

TheCoelacanth 6y ago
In my experience, there's a strong negative correlation between popularity of a technical topic and the average quality of what comes up in a Google search. Popular things like Java or JS have page after page of pure crap. Rust or Haskell will have generally pretty good content. Python used to have decent content, but has been trending downwards sharply.
- arp242 6y ago
  Yeah, I made a very similar observation in a comment last year (which I can't be bothered to find right now). A lot of it is due to excited beginners wanting to write about $topic. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing as such; and I'm a bet less cynical about it than some others in this thread. It's pretty neat that anyone can write something and put it online. I just wish there was a way to filter this kind of stuff. This is where the "throw everything in a big bag"-model of the web comes with some pretty big downsides. But I don't really know how to do it better either.
- acdha 6y ago
  I think it’s a combination of popularity and desirability: are you trying to learn something because you’re genuinely interested or just because it’s what you need to close a ticket and get paid? That’s rarely going to be at either end of the spectrum but Java has been the default choice for corporate body shops for three decades and it really shows in the amount of content aimed at the latter camp. This is amplified by the high frequency of people in that world LARPing as Very Serious Architects layering on gratuitous complexity trying to make business CRUD apps seem more challenging (i.e. expensive) and since statistically nobody understands the system at that point there’s a built-in SEO market catering to the people looking for a quick copy-paste answer.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Interesting, I got the sense that it’s the amateurs / lifestyle strivers who are the market for producing and consuming this content. Go being not very much fun kind of keeps these people away.

TheCoelacanth 6y ago

In my experience, there's a strong negative correlation between popularity of a technical topic and the average quality of what comes up in a Google search. Popular things like Java or JS have page after page of pure crap. Rust or Haskell will have generally pretty good content. Python used to have decent content, but has been trending downwards sharply.

arp242 6y ago
Yeah, I made a very similar observation in a comment last year (which I can't be bothered to find right now). A lot of it is due to excited beginners wanting to write about $topic. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing as such; and I'm a bet less cynical about it than some others in this thread. It's pretty neat that anyone can write something and put it online. I just wish there was a way to filter this kind of stuff. This is where the "throw everything in a big bag"-model of the web comes with some pretty big downsides. But I don't really know how to do it better either.
acdha 6y ago
I think it’s a combination of popularity and desirability: are you trying to learn something because you’re genuinely interested or just because it’s what you need to close a ticket and get paid? That’s rarely going to be at either end of the spectrum but Java has been the default choice for corporate body shops for three decades and it really shows in the amount of content aimed at the latter camp. This is amplified by the high frequency of people in that world LARPing as Very Serious Architects layering on gratuitous complexity trying to make business CRUD apps seem more challenging (i.e. expensive) and since statistically nobody understands the system at that point there’s a built-in SEO market catering to the people looking for a quick copy-paste answer.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Interesting, I got the sense that it’s the amateurs / lifestyle strivers who are the market for producing and consuming this content. Go being not very much fun kind of keeps these people away.