8 ms·
There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results 1. w3schools 2. pinterest
by superasn 5y ago
There are some sites that are so useless and they have never ever helped me once, yet somehow they are always in the top 10 results
1. w3schools
2. pinterest
3. microsoft answers and all microsoft websites actually (it always looks like the person asking the question is asking exactly what i want, but unlike stackexchange, there are seldom any useful answers)
4. all the code clones for SO
5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2, alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole.
6. The best of lists. Google for the love of god, please ban them.. they are always always SEO spam and product placements. Often the blog post itself says "to put your product on this list pay us a $1000 and we will include them in our list."
7. Quora and similar answer sites.. okay it's a mixed bag but you have to be very careful on these sites as most often the answers are just spam. I never read any answer with a link in it. But I think it's more Quora's problem than google. But if google is strict with them they may do a better job at moderating I guess. Also now quora hides answers and asks for a payment. Did they learn nothing from experts-exchange!
- lowken 5y agoI don’t understand the hate for w3schools. I found this site super useful when I was first learning web development.
- naoqj 5y agow3schools is good.
- throwawayffffas 5y agoMDN is usually a much better resource.
- toshk 5y agoMDN is much more complicated. I almost always get my answer faster and easier to understand with w3schools. Plus quick little things like browser support and try it (which mdn also has now)
- naoqj 5y agoMDN is generally too technical.
- Rilfeu 5y agoAs it should be. It's a resource for professional developers, not people who are learning how to code for the first time.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y agoProfessional developers enjoy simple and concise explanations just as much as people who are coding for the first time.
- shp0ngle 5y agoIt depends. MDN has a better overall information and is more in depth. And more up-to-date. On the other hand, w3schools has that one three-line CSS snippet that you need to copy-paste to center your DIV vertically or whatever, without 5 paragraphs of intro.
- jordanwallwork 5y agoI think the problem is that w3schools _was_ terrible. It certainly seems to have improved, but it's reputation - amongst the older coders that I know, at least - is in the toilet
- kmlx 5y agog2 is actually used quite a lot by businesses looking for alternative service providers.
- tremon 5y agoQuora is the first site that I ended up blacklisting by DNS, even before rpz and pi-hole were a thing. I felt dirty every time I inadvertently ended up on that site.
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoThanks for the idea.
- xvello 5y agoShameless plug for the Let's Block It project: we have a filter template to selectively remove domains from search results: https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results For the Stackoverflow / Github clones, we partner with https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter and their lists are available as presets at the bottom of the filter configuration.
- culi 5y agoThat's awesome and exactly what we need. Never any shame in plugging an open source and free project. Would love to see this as a standalone browser plugin some day. Maybe even making it easier to create and share custom lists
- xvello 5y agoThanks for the feedback! The site currently allows you to create one personal list that you can sync across all browsers, but I have plans to allow creating several lists and sharing some of them publicly The main complexity will actually be in the frontend: how to make it easy to edit several instances, and check in what list you'll add a new filter?
- probabletrain 5y agoI use uBlacklist to remove these from my seach results: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://blog.probabletrain.com/hide-w3schools-from-search-results https://blog.probabletrain.com/hide-w3schools-from-search-re... With some lists to block the SO and Github clones: https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translation https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio... https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation
- lapser 5y agoGah, why do we need another blocking addon? Because previously blocking addons have worked out really well. Why can't this have just been a uBlock Origin list?
- lament76 5y agoAlternativeto is quite good in my experience.
- DharmaPolice 5y agow3schools is a pretty good resource for very basic stuff. If you're a professional developer you're probably not going to find it useful but if you're recommending a website for an absolute beginner there are worse sites.
- fleddr 5y agoI would add Stackoverflow for a very significant amount of queries. In particular in the domain of web development extremely outdated answers are heavily outranking far better answers. It shows how domain/link age is a strong factor in ranking, which is also why w3schools ranks highly. That's bad, but I can somewhat sympathize with it as these sites are not really purposefully gaming SEO. It's rather Google's poor handling or relevancy and recenctness. That's an entirely different situation from scammers like pinterest. They clone content without permission and then rank higher than the original. They broadcast content to be open to search engines yet when you visit, it's behind a login. The behavior of duplicating content will normally tank your ranking. Faking content to not be behind a login where it really is behind a login, may get you fully delisted. But not pinterest, they seem to get a free pass for anything.
- jokoon 5y agopinterest is really the worst website ever, especially when you're looking for images. don't they just steal content and then host it? pinterest is the worst when trying to prevent users to use their website when they're not logged in.
- raxxorraxor 5y agoMSDN was really helpful once. I don't even know how they could destroy it relatively quickly. The current forums are indeed useless for the most part. I don't even know where to get deep technical information about MS tech stacks anymore. > "please mark this issue as resolved so I can please my incompetent overlords with a point in a metric they are interested in because of the mentioned incompetence". I agree that users tend to ask the right questions, but the lack of any coherent answer seems to be systematic. Pinterest is spam if you don't have an account, which I would recommend to nobody because of such policies in the first place. Twitter did the same recently but at least it isn't as prominently featured in search results. I don't know about w3schools. It did help me a few times. I guess because the content might be out of date? I am no web developer so I sometimes use it as a reference. I think the worst aspect is that Google seems to favor news sites. Perhaps it is their SEO, but if a term you are looking up accidentally is part of a news article that was copied by tens of news outlets, you have to visit the dark net, page 2+ of Google results.
- bilkow 5y ago> alternativeto I actually find alternativeto so useful that I usually just go directly to it instead of my search engine when looking for FOSS alternatives. Having to go to the alternative page before clicking the official site link is a small hassle compared to finding what's the official from name search, but it used to be better when the description page and the alternative page were the same. If I were to guesa, they probably changed because it would be confusing for people searching for alternatives and finding the software description.
- tapland 5y agoIt's my go to place for alternatives, so if it shows up odds are I wanted that result.
- polote 5y agoMaybe they have never been helpful to you, but w3schools, Microsoft answers, alternative websites, best of lists and Quora have all been helpful to me at some time.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y agoW3schools is wonderful, it's got great primers on a whole lot of languages and libraries with concise, clear explanations and examples.
- speedgoose 5y agoIt used to teach people bad coding practices and it had outdated information. It has improved but I am not ready to recommend it to anyone I like.
- culi 5y agoIt has terribly outdated info today. MDN does everything it does but better and always up to date yet MDN almost always shows up after w3schools in my results
- bobro 5y ago
- charlieyu1 5y agoI’d say it is that it is Microsoft’s faults that their answers sucks. Most commonly asked questions you will be getting one of the three responses: 1. assume the user is at fault 2. it’s a “feature”, get over it 3. the official helper doesn’t know anyway so he/she just pasted a link to some random tutorial they found online which doesn’t work anyway There really isn’t much that Google unless they kinda remove Microsoft at all.
- InCityDreams 5y ago4. Talk utter bollocks about something else.
- poisonarena 5y agopinterest completely destroyed google images and is now starting to infect duckduckgo
- wintermutestwin 5y agoYou included MS Answers, but left out discussions.apple.com, which I find to be an even greater disappointment. This pair of $2T+ enterprises have failed so badly at something that should be table stakes. How hard would it be to pay a small team to go through this tangled mess and clean it up and keep it that way? How little do they care about the attitudes of their users??
- AlwaysRock 5y agow3schools isnt perfect but they are god for html and css syntax.
- dayvid 5y agow3schools was useful when it first came out years ago. It's probably riding on its initial utility. I remember when the w3fools site was released later (https://www.w3fools.com/ https://www.w3fools.com/)
- culi 5y ago> 5. all alternative to / review sites like capterra, g2, alternativeto, etc. They might have some good suggestions but they always hide the link to the software/site and instead link it to their spammy page. So you have to select part of the link and then re-search it on Google. Doing this for OSS projects can sometimes lead to a whole new rabbit hole. Wow I've never had this pop up for me tbh. I wish alternativeto would come up more often, it's a really great resource and it's all crowd-sourced so it's very valuable information. Definitely wouldn't classify it as seo spam
- id02009 5y agoI remember W3schools being an excellent resource closer to the beginning of my career (a decade ago?), but now I barely ever enter. But I always thought it's me who outgrew it not that it became worse...
- PokestarFan 5y agoI feel like their site hasn't been overhauled in about 8 years.
- akhosravian 5y agoWould add cplusplus.com to this list. Cppreference is just a better resource in every way.
- swethmandava 5y agoGoogle regresses to the mean - what do most people want to see on the top? just from comments on this thread, people both love and hate w3schools. So I think there's a need for personalized search engines where one can pick their sources - we designed You.com keeping that in mind. fwiw i hate w3schools too, if anyone's counting
- MzHN 5y agoAs many have mentioned, w3schools ranks high because it is actually used a lot more than MDN. People love it because they don't have to read. Just copy and paste and you can get back to work. And that's fine. It's a nice thought that programmers should understand their code, but remember that article about 99% developers. They get work done, ideals only stand in the way. The actual issue with w3schools is that the code that's available for copy-pasting is terrible. A lot of it looks like it either hasn't been updated since 90s or 00s, or at least whoever wrote it hasn't done web development since then. That's not necessarily bad, but for example JavaScript was much more of a pain back then, and you can now write much more maintainable code. Same for how HTML has progressed. I wouldn't replace w3schools with some bleeding edge frontend practices, or even with the newest web standards, because those are even worse than using spaghetti code from the 90s. The former is way too complex for just copy-pasting, and the latter requires you to read about browser compatibility and other caveats, so it is harmful to just copy-paste it. What I wish would replace w3schools, is a site that takes into account both why people love using w3schools, and still sets them on the right path to write maintainable code with at least some best practices considered.
- kbelder 4y agoHalf the programming questions I have are something along the line of: "In this random language I'm using this week, is it strlen? len? length? count? And iIs it a static function or an object method?" or "How do I get the day of the week from a datetime variable again?" Stupid little things where I just need a reminder. Half the time, the answer is in the search results themselves and doesn't even require a clickthrough. W3 is fine for those sorts of questions... it's brief and to the point, and the fact that it doesn't go into thorough explanations or weird edge cases is even a good thing.