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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

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?
      - BoxOfRain 5y ago
        I’d pay a subscription for searches that effectively removed cruft and heavily SEO’d listings. The classic example is looking for a recipe and getting an essay of SEO bullshit about how these cabbage leaves were grown by the Mad Monks of Machynlleth and remind the author of the their childhood frolicking around the depths of Mordor or whatever, but also things like stackoverflow or GitHub cut-and-pastes, blog spam, empty posts with nothing but trigger words to get the ranking higher, literally any link to things like Pinterest, and other annoyances which push actually useful results down the page. Essentially I want a search engine that can differentiate results that exist to solve a problem I have and results which offer nothing and just want to divert my eyes from a problem to show me ads. That’s the difference, I don’t mind seeing ads next to things that are actually useful but many of Google’s results exist for no other reason but to show me ads and offer nothing useful. I’d happily pay £20 a month for a search engine that removes these pervasive annoyances reliably.
  - Tostino 5y ago
    This is about my experience as well. Google has just about become useless for a ton of searches I had no problem with a few years ago. The results take so much longer to find relevant results for just about anything
tjpnz 5y ago
A little off topic but I've recently started seeing duplicate search results on the same page, one after the other. Not sure if this is a bug or if it's yet another SEO loophole that's being actively exploited.
shrikant 5y ago
I've also noticed a lot of sites that now scrape GitHub Issues and the discussions on there that are increasingly spamming search results. GithubMemory, GitMemory and Giters are the domains that come to mind immediately, but there's loads of other non-obvious ones as well. Domain denylisting can't come soon enough as a feature from search results, urgh.
- eCa 5y ago
  > Domain denylisting can't come soon enough as a feature from search results, urgh. Crude solution: At least in Firefox you can assign keyword shortcuts to search engines. Since you control the requested url you can -site:w3schools.com the offending domains.
  - medstrom 5y ago
    Also there's an addon for hiding results from specific sites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/
- hidden-spyder 5y ago
  The uBlacklist browser extension lets you blacklist domains from Google Search. See if that helps you.
- aendruk 5y ago
  It came and went, sadly. https://searchengineland.com/google-finally-discontinues-the-blocked-sites-feature-152885 https://searchengineland.com/google-finally-discontinues-the...
qwertox 5y ago
I agree. As a German I'm even getting some odd results of a auto-translated Stack Overflow Q/A. There's one site which is doing this automatic copying+translating and when I land on it it drives me absolutely mad, I get angry that this is even a thing and even more so that Google is indexing and offering me their pages in the results. Other than that, I prefer to search on google because I know that I will get a couple of good links from which I can then first open a couple in background tabs (mmb-click), then close the search tab and start looking at the pages.
- mfollert 5y ago
  Diese Seiten gehen mir auch extrem auf die Nerven!
  - V__ 5y ago
    Wütendes hochwähl.
    - Hackbraten 5y ago
      Allein deshalb klicke ich auf deutschsprachige Suchergebnisse schon gar nicht mehr drauf.
stiray 5y ago
As far as I am concerned google already dropped the ball. For 2 years I am getting useless results immediately when I am not searching for something very generic. I am leaving shadow of a doubt that there might be a reason that I am never logged in and I am cleaning all the tracking cookies. I have skipped to self-hosted searx instance and I get much better results when they are aggregated. I believe that the whole problem comes from their AI. Since most of people on planet are searching for things that are highly non-technical, the AI is learned to give them priority over the technical documentation etc. which almost nobody uses. I am also experiencing that the sites that I know are there, are not returned at all (or somewhere on 100th page). I would really love to see the google search as it was 20 years back. At that time it was far more useful, quite frankly I didn't see any improvement in precision of search results from those times, it only went to the worse.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  As a counterpoint, I feel like Google's results are far better than they used to be. What's more, I find Google ridiculously good for technical queries compared to the competition, and I'm often surprised at how Google will know the intent behind my search even if my query is vague. For example "cat pipe" gives me a bunch of answers related to the shell (as well as some pictures of cats dressed like Sherlock Holmes). They still aren't perfect, but most of the time the result I want is in the first page of the first query. Twenty years ago, I had an actual advantage over others due to knowing how to write a good query and find the appropriate result (Google-fu). Nowadays that skill is largely obsolete. This site cloning has always been an issue. Before the current iteration of SO/GH SEO clone farms, you had sites doing the same thing with expertsexchange and cloned forum pages. I do find it odd that Google won't just block the big ones, but perhaps they internally don't like doing one off hacks and prefer to find a cleaner algorithmic solution?
  - bsdubernerd 5y ago
    The counterpoint is that it's now actually useless to craft a query that tries to match exact terms, because there's this extra layer on top of it. So you might be lucky if the inferred intent of the engine was correct, but good luck steering it away. It doesn't help pretty much all query logic operators are merely hints nowadays, more often ignored than not. I very much preferred a dumber engine for this reason, since it was way easier to search precisely and avoid SEO, even as the SEO game changed. I'm also using a local searx instance now. I'm not terribly happy about it as bing/ddg also have very similar issues, so searching for exact terms still doesn't work the way it should. But it's much easier to blackhole SEO silos, pre-filter queries NOT matching my exact queries, as well as yielding more obscure content.
k3liutZu 5y ago
Yep. There's also lots of sites that copy/paste GitHub issues. Just bring be directly to the GitHub issue, not to these clones.
dgellow 5y ago
> I find a lot of sites in the top results that have simply scraped Stack Overflow and reposted their content verbatim. Since last year I get very often results from websites that scraped GitHub issues and just reposted them, often with no easy-to-find reference to the source. For some reasons they seem to have extremely good SEO. Edit: commented too quickly, that's already mentioned by 2 other comments...
- 8note 5y ago
  For the SEO, the content in the issues is still good. The real question is why GitHub itself isn't higher, and the most obvious answer is that it's owned by Microsoft. User generated content is only prioritized if it's from a Google run community
eloisius 5y ago
I’ve been using Kagi for the last month. I’ve made a point of trying out every upstart search engine I can get access too and so far this one has been great. A good sign is that I think very little about it. It tends to hit canonical sources more often than scraper sites like gitmemory dot com or the stackoverflow scrapers you mentioned. I’m a little annoyed that I have to be logged in because my default search engine doesn’t work in private windows, other Firefox containers, etc. Something I noticed with Brave (my last experiment) was that it was awesome at first and then started to slide. It feels like restaurants that are great when their first open and become meh after a year or so. I wonder if popularity hurts search quality so I’m almost reluctant to share Kagi. I hope they can continue to delivery this quality.

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?
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      I’d pay a subscription for searches that effectively removed cruft and heavily SEO’d listings. The classic example is looking for a recipe and getting an essay of SEO bullshit about how these cabbage leaves were grown by the Mad Monks of Machynlleth and remind the author of the their childhood frolicking around the depths of Mordor or whatever, but also things like stackoverflow or GitHub cut-and-pastes, blog spam, empty posts with nothing but trigger words to get the ranking higher, literally any link to things like Pinterest, and other annoyances which push actually useful results down the page. Essentially I want a search engine that can differentiate results that exist to solve a problem I have and results which offer nothing and just want to divert my eyes from a problem to show me ads. That’s the difference, I don’t mind seeing ads next to things that are actually useful but many of Google’s results exist for no other reason but to show me ads and offer nothing useful. I’d happily pay £20 a month for a search engine that removes these pervasive annoyances reliably.
- Tostino 5y ago
  This is about my experience as well. Google has just about become useless for a ton of searches I had no problem with a few years ago. The results take so much longer to find relevant results for just about anything

tjpnz 5y ago

A little off topic but I've recently started seeing duplicate search results on the same page, one after the other. Not sure if this is a bug or if it's yet another SEO loophole that's being actively exploited.

shrikant 5y ago

I've also noticed a lot of sites that now scrape GitHub Issues and the discussions on there that are increasingly spamming search results. GithubMemory, GitMemory and Giters are the domains that come to mind immediately, but there's loads of other non-obvious ones as well. Domain denylisting can't come soon enough as a feature from search results, urgh.

eCa 5y ago
> Domain denylisting can't come soon enough as a feature from search results, urgh. Crude solution: At least in Firefox you can assign keyword shortcuts to search engines. Since you control the requested url you can -site:w3schools.com the offending domains.
- medstrom 5y ago
  Also there's an addon for hiding results from specific sites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/
hidden-spyder 5y ago
The uBlacklist browser extension lets you blacklist domains from Google Search. See if that helps you.
aendruk 5y ago
It came and went, sadly. https://searchengineland.com/google-finally-discontinues-the-blocked-sites-feature-152885 https://searchengineland.com/google-finally-discontinues-the...

qwertox 5y ago

I agree. As a German I'm even getting some odd results of a auto-translated Stack Overflow Q/A. There's one site which is doing this automatic copying+translating and when I land on it it drives me absolutely mad, I get angry that this is even a thing and even more so that Google is indexing and offering me their pages in the results. Other than that, I prefer to search on google because I know that I will get a couple of good links from which I can then first open a couple in background tabs (mmb-click), then close the search tab and start looking at the pages.

mfollert 5y ago
Diese Seiten gehen mir auch extrem auf die Nerven!
- V__ 5y ago
  Wütendes hochwähl.
  - Hackbraten 5y ago
    Allein deshalb klicke ich auf deutschsprachige Suchergebnisse schon gar nicht mehr drauf.

stiray 5y ago

As far as I am concerned google already dropped the ball. For 2 years I am getting useless results immediately when I am not searching for something very generic. I am leaving shadow of a doubt that there might be a reason that I am never logged in and I am cleaning all the tracking cookies. I have skipped to self-hosted searx instance and I get much better results when they are aggregated. I believe that the whole problem comes from their AI. Since most of people on planet are searching for things that are highly non-technical, the AI is learned to give them priority over the technical documentation etc. which almost nobody uses. I am also experiencing that the sites that I know are there, are not returned at all (or somewhere on 100th page). I would really love to see the google search as it was 20 years back. At that time it was far more useful, quite frankly I didn't see any improvement in precision of search results from those times, it only went to the worse.

cameronh90 5y ago
As a counterpoint, I feel like Google's results are far better than they used to be. What's more, I find Google ridiculously good for technical queries compared to the competition, and I'm often surprised at how Google will know the intent behind my search even if my query is vague. For example "cat pipe" gives me a bunch of answers related to the shell (as well as some pictures of cats dressed like Sherlock Holmes). They still aren't perfect, but most of the time the result I want is in the first page of the first query. Twenty years ago, I had an actual advantage over others due to knowing how to write a good query and find the appropriate result (Google-fu). Nowadays that skill is largely obsolete. This site cloning has always been an issue. Before the current iteration of SO/GH SEO clone farms, you had sites doing the same thing with expertsexchange and cloned forum pages. I do find it odd that Google won't just block the big ones, but perhaps they internally don't like doing one off hacks and prefer to find a cleaner algorithmic solution?
- bsdubernerd 5y ago
  The counterpoint is that it's now actually useless to craft a query that tries to match exact terms, because there's this extra layer on top of it. So you might be lucky if the inferred intent of the engine was correct, but good luck steering it away. It doesn't help pretty much all query logic operators are merely hints nowadays, more often ignored than not. I very much preferred a dumber engine for this reason, since it was way easier to search precisely and avoid SEO, even as the SEO game changed. I'm also using a local searx instance now. I'm not terribly happy about it as bing/ddg also have very similar issues, so searching for exact terms still doesn't work the way it should. But it's much easier to blackhole SEO silos, pre-filter queries NOT matching my exact queries, as well as yielding more obscure content.

k3liutZu 5y ago

Yep. There's also lots of sites that copy/paste GitHub issues. Just bring be directly to the GitHub issue, not to these clones.

dgellow 5y ago

> I find a lot of sites in the top results that have simply scraped Stack Overflow and reposted their content verbatim. Since last year I get very often results from websites that scraped GitHub issues and just reposted them, often with no easy-to-find reference to the source. For some reasons they seem to have extremely good SEO. Edit: commented too quickly, that's already mentioned by 2 other comments...

8note 5y ago
For the SEO, the content in the issues is still good. The real question is why GitHub itself isn't higher, and the most obvious answer is that it's owned by Microsoft. User generated content is only prioritized if it's from a Google run community

eloisius 5y ago

I’ve been using Kagi for the last month. I’ve made a point of trying out every upstart search engine I can get access too and so far this one has been great. A good sign is that I think very little about it. It tends to hit canonical sources more often than scraper sites like gitmemory dot com or the stackoverflow scrapers you mentioned. I’m a little annoyed that I have to be logged in because my default search engine doesn’t work in private windows, other Firefox containers, etc. Something I noticed with Brave (my last experiment) was that it was awesome at first and then started to slide. It feels like restaurants that are great when their first open and become meh after a year or so. I wonder if popularity hurts search quality so I’m almost reluctant to share Kagi. I hope they can continue to delivery this quality.