18 ms·

Googling for Software Development: What Developers Search for and What They Find

71 points by zdw 5y ago

koilke 5y ago
https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~andrehora/pub/2021-msr-googling-for-development.pdf https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~andrehora/pub/2021-msr-googli...
nitnelave 5y ago
It seems to be skewed towards web development, with W3schools as one of the top 3 sources. Selection bias or natural sample bias?
- sseagull 5y ago
  I’ve been getting more and more w3schools for non-web python development. Even ranked higher than python’s standard library docs. And thats on DDG as well. Top-tier SEO there. Same with geeksforgeeks.
  - RandyGoldy 5y ago
    I've recently started to get involved in software and application development. I thought it might be a good way to make money. Now I'm on the initial path, so sometimes it's hard for me to figure out some of the details, so I use the services https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ to check my software or the part that I managed to develop.
wirthjason 5y ago
I feel like Google is dropping the ball in this area. Lately when I search for something I find a lot of sites in the top results that have simply scraped Stack Overflow and reposted their content verbatim. I don’t know if these copy-paste sites are a new thing, or they have always been there but I never noticed because Google de-prioritized their score because it’s low value content and recent algorithm changes now promote then higher.
- aigo 5y ago
  This is basically the case for every search I make now. Recipes, how to guides, DIY, programming, you name it. The SEO spammers have taken over the world.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Perhaps controversial but I feel that we reached a saturation point with google's insistence on AI/natural language queries, where ddg is now giving me better search results than google for technical queries. I think the only area where google is still able to outcompete other engines is searching for regional results in Google Shopping, apart from that SEO's are effectively eating google for breakfast.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      The only way Google could claw me back from DDG at this point is finding a way of eliminating the endless SEO spam and useless content mills from their results. It plagues both of them but at least DDG makes a point of being less insufferably nosy.
      - gonzo41 5y ago
        I bet they make more money by not fixing the problem. Google could pretty easily drop scraping sites hard to the bottom of the list and prioritize fresh content. But it probably pays not to. So sadly you're not worth the effort. I think DDG, being somewhat privacy focused has a more traditional index, whereas I strongly suspect google would be profiling the devices and people making queries based around time of day and device used to determine what type of results to favor. I actually get good results with google. But my technical queries are all done from my work laptop, so i expect there's a profiling, fingerprinitng going on on the google side that's shaping the index I use. or its magic. Could you ever see yourself paying for search? How bad is google, what would you pay to change it?
rajasimon 5y ago
My theory is that developers are spending more time on the Google and wandering around to find the answers. Half of the time simple stackoverflow search will reveal the correct answer. And other half is simply a reference to particular documentation. This is why I started a hacker assist project but not started it yet. I was planning to implement the documentation search and the stackoverflow search in the common place. Also little bit of the blog search. If I provide these curated results in the single place then the chances are that the developer get the results quickly rather than search through the Google.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I'd tend to think that at this point people happy with Stack Overflow will go directly there. Going through generic search would be more to get either the official documentation link (Google can be faster than searching the language site ...), or trying to see what option there are on the subject we're looking for. In particular, random errors can be easier to search when including blog posts and other docs that just SO. Also not every search needs to be quick or optimized, finding alternatives along the way is nice sometimes.
visarga 5y ago
One thing it can't do well is search for negatives. In some cases it will latch on the opposite of what you want because that's what most people search for.
- fkarg 5y ago
  yeah, when I did, it felt like Google just ignored the negation. the results didn't materially differ with or without it.
- leeoniya 5y ago
  coffee shop -starbucks -dunkin used to work in Maps. not anymore. :eyeroll:
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    pro-tip: For finding good coffee in strange places, search for "espresso roaster". I have had great success with this approach.
Rainymood 5y ago
Yesterday, I wrote a short blog post titled "Don't mistake the internet's intelligence for your own" [0] which is very closely related to this blog post here. I wrote it it to shine some light on the fact that knowledge on the internet (Google, SO) is not ~your~ knowledge. This fact often gets painfully exposed during interviews. Funny timing. [0] https://www.janmeppe.com/blog/dont-confuse-intelligence/ https://www.janmeppe.com/blog/dont-confuse-intelligence/
- wruza 5y ago
  It makes me think of how much complexity we agree to live/work with, being actually unable to manage it without searching the internet. It’s really funny that interviewers try to expose that, cause regular developers (think fullstack configuration vs software algorithms) do just that: convert the internet to a source code of mediocre value but high complexity, and then implement a crucial business logic on top of that. Which cannot be learned beforehand, unless you’re reimplementing something for legal reasons. Is that really a bad thing?
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I think most of this complexity is a failure in scope limitation. No exaggeration I wouldn't be surprised if the average piece of software today is 1000 times bigger and slower than it needs to be. You need to spell check a text? In the 1980s, you could do that relatively quickly on a computer with no network access. The dictionary data was pretty big back then but today it will fit in an L3 cache. Today, each checked word likely gets converted to JSON and is then sent around the world through load balancers and proxies to some cloud instance where it is deserialized and checked and a new JSON message is encoded saying "{\"message\:\"yup, it's a word\"}", which gets passed back through a bunch of servers until it ends up in a mobile app that is really a souped up HTML widget. Spell checking isn't by any means trivial programming, but it doesn't require planet scale computing either. There is no benefit to that. It's just a waste of resources. So why do we build things that way? Because of Parkinson's law. If we had put a constraint on resources, we would have found a faster and better way of doing it. This is in part why I advocate targeting low power hardware when designing a new system. If it's fast on a Raspberry PI, then it will be fast on any hardware. You will identify scaling problems early while the code is still malleable and easy to redesign.
intricatedetail 5y ago
I use Google less and less. Their results have dropped in quality dramatically. Even the first page is littered with spam and often dangerous sites disguised as legitimate. I wouldn't dare using it on Windows - it's pretty much guaranteed now to get malware. Apart from spam there is also lot less results in terms of quantity or no results at all. Year or two ago I could find a lot of interesting content, today it's just spam mostly.
denton-scratch 5y ago
W3Schools presumably comes up because Google favours them. I don't trust it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
b112 5y ago
One problem with google is its ridiculous, and absurd word substitution. This started more than a decade ago, with things such as 'Bob" being aliased to "Robert". Back then, before the annoying Google Plus came onto the scene, the + could be used to insist that a word is never aliased, always present in search results. This was deprecated due to conflicts with Google Plus searches for name+ or whatever, and half-assed replaced with 'use quotes they're the same', which of course they are NOT the same. Google just gives slightly higher precedence to quoted text, and will chose to ignore its existence and alias if required. Thus, 'verbatim' search was created, under a hard to find menu item, doesn't work with things such as date matching, isn't available until after you search, and is only a partial replacement for the now missing + (which only did one word). These days, google auto-aliases everything. Debian is aliased to ubuntu, and others. dhclient is aliased to dhcp (due to dhcpd/dhcpcd), and on and on, so searching for the precise thing is only even remotely possible with verbatim. Of course, verbatim itself often breaks now, randomly still aliases things, and is just a PITA to use. The reason behind all of this, is voice search, plain and simple. How can you search for 'here' 'hear' via voice, without aliasing? Even searching for 'tanya' via voice, means people might want 'tania' 'tanyah' or whatever other close sounding word is the case. So, google continues to destroy search results for those wanting precision, because google thinks the code should be the same. One of the richest companies on the planet, can't manage a few extra coder cycles, pulled away from whatever advertising scheme they're working on, to slap in a few if statements for 'text' or 'voice' differentiation. I used to love google. Used to.
- steerablesafe 5y ago
  Quoting still seems to work? As I remember + was always for emphasis/importance and quoting was for verbatim, but maybe I remember wrong. I get highlights for Robert here: https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+downey https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+downey No highlights for Robert here: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22bob%22+downey https://www.google.com/search?q=%22bob%22+downey Otherwise the found pages are similar here, but that's maybe because the search is very specific.
- alok-g 5y ago
  +1. I just wrote a similar thing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29351147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29351147 I hope this is not a sign that someone here will disrupt today's web search using, for a change, older technology. :-)
steerablesafe 5y ago
There are still some hidden gem features of search that are still there, like prefixing your search terms with site:example.com, or sometimes even better: -site:example.com .
zpotty 5y ago
I've recently started to get involved in software and application development. I thought it might be a good way to make money. Now I'm on the initial path, so sometimes it's hard for me to figure out some of the details, so I use the services https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ to check my software or the part that I managed to develop.

71 points by zdw 5y ago

https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~andrehora/pub/2021-msr-googling-for-development.pdf https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~andrehora/pub/2021-msr-googli...

nitnelave 5y ago

It seems to be skewed towards web development, with W3schools as one of the top 3 sources. Selection bias or natural sample bias?

sseagull 5y ago
I’ve been getting more and more w3schools for non-web python development. Even ranked higher than python’s standard library docs. And thats on DDG as well. Top-tier SEO there. Same with geeksforgeeks.
- RandyGoldy 5y ago
  I've recently started to get involved in software and application development. I thought it might be a good way to make money. Now I'm on the initial path, so sometimes it's hard for me to figure out some of the details, so I use the services https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ to check my software or the part that I managed to develop.

wirthjason 5y ago

I feel like Google is dropping the ball in this area. Lately when I search for something I find a lot of sites in the top results that have simply scraped Stack Overflow and reposted their content verbatim. I don’t know if these copy-paste sites are a new thing, or they have always been there but I never noticed because Google de-prioritized their score because it’s low value content and recent algorithm changes now promote then higher.

aigo 5y ago
This is basically the case for every search I make now. Recipes, how to guides, DIY, programming, you name it. The SEO spammers have taken over the world.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Perhaps controversial but I feel that we reached a saturation point with google's insistence on AI/natural language queries, where ddg is now giving me better search results than google for technical queries. I think the only area where google is still able to outcompete other engines is searching for regional results in Google Shopping, apart from that SEO's are effectively eating google for breakfast.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    The only way Google could claw me back from DDG at this point is finding a way of eliminating the endless SEO spam and useless content mills from their results. It plagues both of them but at least DDG makes a point of being less insufferably nosy.
    - gonzo41 5y ago
      I bet they make more money by not fixing the problem. Google could pretty easily drop scraping sites hard to the bottom of the list and prioritize fresh content. But it probably pays not to. So sadly you're not worth the effort. I think DDG, being somewhat privacy focused has a more traditional index, whereas I strongly suspect google would be profiling the devices and people making queries based around time of day and device used to determine what type of results to favor. I actually get good results with google. But my technical queries are all done from my work laptop, so i expect there's a profiling, fingerprinitng going on on the google side that's shaping the index I use. or its magic. Could you ever see yourself paying for search? How bad is google, what would you pay to change it?

rajasimon 5y ago

My theory is that developers are spending more time on the Google and wandering around to find the answers. Half of the time simple stackoverflow search will reveal the correct answer. And other half is simply a reference to particular documentation. This is why I started a hacker assist project but not started it yet. I was planning to implement the documentation search and the stackoverflow search in the common place. Also little bit of the blog search. If I provide these curated results in the single place then the chances are that the developer get the results quickly rather than search through the Google.

makeitdouble 5y ago
I'd tend to think that at this point people happy with Stack Overflow will go directly there. Going through generic search would be more to get either the official documentation link (Google can be faster than searching the language site ...), or trying to see what option there are on the subject we're looking for. In particular, random errors can be easier to search when including blog posts and other docs that just SO. Also not every search needs to be quick or optimized, finding alternatives along the way is nice sometimes.

visarga 5y ago

One thing it can't do well is search for negatives. In some cases it will latch on the opposite of what you want because that's what most people search for.

fkarg 5y ago
yeah, when I did, it felt like Google just ignored the negation. the results didn't materially differ with or without it.
leeoniya 5y ago
coffee shop -starbucks -dunkin used to work in Maps. not anymore. :eyeroll:
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  pro-tip: For finding good coffee in strange places, search for "espresso roaster". I have had great success with this approach.

Rainymood 5y ago

Yesterday, I wrote a short blog post titled "Don't mistake the internet's intelligence for your own" [0] which is very closely related to this blog post here. I wrote it it to shine some light on the fact that knowledge on the internet (Google, SO) is not ~your~ knowledge. This fact often gets painfully exposed during interviews. Funny timing. [0] https://www.janmeppe.com/blog/dont-confuse-intelligence/ https://www.janmeppe.com/blog/dont-confuse-intelligence/

wruza 5y ago
It makes me think of how much complexity we agree to live/work with, being actually unable to manage it without searching the internet. It’s really funny that interviewers try to expose that, cause regular developers (think fullstack configuration vs software algorithms) do just that: convert the internet to a source code of mediocre value but high complexity, and then implement a crucial business logic on top of that. Which cannot be learned beforehand, unless you’re reimplementing something for legal reasons. Is that really a bad thing?
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I think most of this complexity is a failure in scope limitation. No exaggeration I wouldn't be surprised if the average piece of software today is 1000 times bigger and slower than it needs to be. You need to spell check a text? In the 1980s, you could do that relatively quickly on a computer with no network access. The dictionary data was pretty big back then but today it will fit in an L3 cache. Today, each checked word likely gets converted to JSON and is then sent around the world through load balancers and proxies to some cloud instance where it is deserialized and checked and a new JSON message is encoded saying "{\"message\:\"yup, it's a word\"}", which gets passed back through a bunch of servers until it ends up in a mobile app that is really a souped up HTML widget. Spell checking isn't by any means trivial programming, but it doesn't require planet scale computing either. There is no benefit to that. It's just a waste of resources. So why do we build things that way? Because of Parkinson's law. If we had put a constraint on resources, we would have found a faster and better way of doing it. This is in part why I advocate targeting low power hardware when designing a new system. If it's fast on a Raspberry PI, then it will be fast on any hardware. You will identify scaling problems early while the code is still malleable and easy to redesign.

intricatedetail 5y ago

I use Google less and less. Their results have dropped in quality dramatically. Even the first page is littered with spam and often dangerous sites disguised as legitimate. I wouldn't dare using it on Windows - it's pretty much guaranteed now to get malware. Apart from spam there is also lot less results in terms of quantity or no results at all. Year or two ago I could find a lot of interesting content, today it's just spam mostly.

denton-scratch 5y ago

W3Schools presumably comes up because Google favours them. I don't trust it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

b112 5y ago

One problem with google is its ridiculous, and absurd word substitution. This started more than a decade ago, with things such as 'Bob" being aliased to "Robert". Back then, before the annoying Google Plus came onto the scene, the + could be used to insist that a word is never aliased, always present in search results. This was deprecated due to conflicts with Google Plus searches for name+ or whatever, and half-assed replaced with 'use quotes they're the same', which of course they are NOT the same. Google just gives slightly higher precedence to quoted text, and will chose to ignore its existence and alias if required. Thus, 'verbatim' search was created, under a hard to find menu item, doesn't work with things such as date matching, isn't available until after you search, and is only a partial replacement for the now missing + (which only did one word). These days, google auto-aliases everything. Debian is aliased to ubuntu, and others. dhclient is aliased to dhcp (due to dhcpd/dhcpcd), and on and on, so searching for the precise thing is only even remotely possible with verbatim. Of course, verbatim itself often breaks now, randomly still aliases things, and is just a PITA to use. The reason behind all of this, is voice search, plain and simple. How can you search for 'here' 'hear' via voice, without aliasing? Even searching for 'tanya' via voice, means people might want 'tania' 'tanyah' or whatever other close sounding word is the case. So, google continues to destroy search results for those wanting precision, because google thinks the code should be the same. One of the richest companies on the planet, can't manage a few extra coder cycles, pulled away from whatever advertising scheme they're working on, to slap in a few if statements for 'text' or 'voice' differentiation. I used to love google. Used to.

steerablesafe 5y ago
Quoting still seems to work? As I remember + was always for emphasis/importance and quoting was for verbatim, but maybe I remember wrong. I get highlights for Robert here: https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+downey https://www.google.com/search?q=bob+downey No highlights for Robert here: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22bob%22+downey https://www.google.com/search?q=%22bob%22+downey Otherwise the found pages are similar here, but that's maybe because the search is very specific.
alok-g 5y ago
+1. I just wrote a similar thing here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29351147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29351147 I hope this is not a sign that someone here will disrupt today's web search using, for a change, older technology. :-)

steerablesafe 5y ago

There are still some hidden gem features of search that are still there, like prefixing your search terms with site:example.com, or sometimes even better: -site:example.com .

zpotty 5y ago

I've recently started to get involved in software and application development. I thought it might be a good way to make money. Now I'm on the initial path, so sometimes it's hard for me to figure out some of the details, so I use the services https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ https://fortegrp.com/quality-assurance-and-testing/ to check my software or the part that I managed to develop.