11 ms·

Googling for answers costs time (2020)

126 points by mleonhard 3y ago

cassianoleal 3y ago
DuckDuckGo gives me a relevant StackOverflow as the first result. Furthermore, it displays it on the actual search page, on the right-hand side.
jacobxu 3y ago
thats why chatgpt works so well, it literally replaced google for searching basic syntax
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  It works really well for questions that have easy answers and that are asked a lot. It works less well when you have a question that doesn't have an obvious answer. For fun, try 'How can I write to a Parquet file in Java without Hadoop?'. It will vacillate between giving answers that pull in hadoop dependencies, and nonsense that doesn't compile at all. (here's a useful proper answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59939309/read-local-parquet-file-without-hadoop-path-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59939309/read-local-parq...)
  - Closi 3y ago
    It also works well for questions that have easy/medium answers and aren’t asked a lot. Complex questions that involve things that aren’t well documented are obviously going to be harder for an LLM to answer, particularly when the LLM does not have a capability to test its own code.
  - joebiden2 3y ago
    That's ChatGPT-4's response to that question: https://chat.openai.com/share/72d490a9-2b2a-4120-9bb0-3a59d417a41e https://chat.openai.com/share/72d490a9-2b2a-4120-9bb0-3a59d4... I briefly checked if the mentioned dependencies exist (they do). Too late over here to actually try the code.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Main.java:27:33 java: org.apache.parquet.io.OutputFile is abstract; cannot be instantiated Main.java:29:17 java: cannot access org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path class file for org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path not found It basically solves the problem by not importing hadoop dependencies (despite needing to), and hallucinating classes.
raldi 3y ago
This article was written in 2020 and it shows. I type these queries into an LLM now and 95% of the time within seconds it outputs outstanding answers.
- LordShredda 3y ago
  If you have such simple questions then thanks for not wasting people's time on stackoverflow
  - raldi 3y ago
    It works for impressively difficult questions, but even for simple ones (like this article is about) they would surely already be already answered a decade ago on Stack Overflow so there would be no need to ask them anew.
cratermoon 3y ago
Cooking sites have been this way for a long time. Google for a recipe for something simple and the top results are long articles about the foods, the process, and so on. At least the better cooking sites put a link to the recipe near the top.
version_five 3y ago
I take the point, but a developer with any experience is able to use google as a portal to get to the relevant SO or documentation page very quickly in spite of whatever shenanigans google+seo tries. It's not like every time you google some syntax you're actually distracted by tutorialspoint or whatever garbage. These sites must just feed on people who are in the first day or two of their careers, after that you don't even seen them.
- inetknght 3y ago
  > a developer with any experience is able to use google as a portal to get to the relevant SO That's mostly because SO search is (or, has historically been) terrible. > or documentation page Ironically, documentation pages exist and many of them are terrible. But even the great ones aren't linked to in code snippets. Got a squiggly line? It would be handy to have a link to documentation!
  - bornfreddy 3y ago
    > That's mostly because SO search is (or, has historically been) terrible. It still is. There is a trick though - start typing a new question and it will suggest you possible duplicates. Works like magic, they really did a great job with this "search".
willsmith72 3y ago
100% agréé, and not just on programming searches. That's why it's so easy for my to justify gpt plus to myself. Could be programming questions, holiday planning, business advice. Just about anything
reaperman 3y ago
> * But to me, the user, it feels like I’m paying for my answers with my time pointlessly scrolling around the page to find the answer I came to the site for. I can’t stand it; I feel like I am being duped, misled, being taken for a ride, just so I know how to make pancakes, or how to do a simple thing in common programming language.* Absolutely agree with this. I strongly prefer reading the official language API documentation directly, which makes me very sensitive to the quality of the documentation. I have also replaced my google searches (which usually are more along the lines of “what’s the most idiomatic way to do x?” or “what’s the most correct way to do x in $LANG?”) with ChatGPT. It’s super fast, generally pretty good for the types of style questions you’d usually have learning a new language, and I can directly query it about what tradeoffs different techniques have in various common situations. ChatGPT has finally gotten me off Google’s Wild Ride.
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  I like to use the Bing AI for that because ChatGPT can sometimes hallucinate while Bing will use its knowledge + stuff from websites which makes it a more reliable source for things which should match reality.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    On the contrary, I find all the LLMs (including ChatGPT browsing beta) which search to find answers repeat the same blogspam as everyone else. They save time by parsing the blogspam for me, but it’s still low quality. Phind gets an honorable mention though - if that’s the style you prefer I’d strongly recommend it. ChatGPT does hallucinate all the time, but for “learning a language from scratch” it’s very very very minimal. I can’t recall a single time it gave me a response to “idiomatic way to do x in $LANG” which included hallucinated information. Just can’t back it into a corner trying to get it to customize something that needs rigorous optimization for your use case. Overall, the large innate knowledge base of ChatGPT-4 seems to contain a great model of the modern features of most programming languages and their packages (popular PyPI packages, Spring, Boost, Qt, etc, etc). Once I let it browse the internet, quality goes down and roughly matches Bing and Bard. Phind I think gets around this by having a custom ranking of sources or something. Not sure what their secret sauce is but it mostly works pretty well.
hourago 3y ago
By the author's metric is even worse to read a book. If you are looking for the exact answer to your exact code maybe that is the problem. To get free training so you can solve your problem yourself and understand the overall situation seems a very good deal. The example to complain about seems very badly chosen. I think that Google is getting worse and that advertisements in webpages should be regulated. But to complain that you are being taught to fish instead of given a fish seems too entitled.
- TillE 3y ago
  There's a world of difference between a well-written, well-edited book and SEO spam. The latter is not making a genuine attempt to actually teach you, that's not the point.
  - hourago 3y ago
    This is the link: https://realpython.com/iterate-through-dictionary-python/ https://realpython.com/iterate-through-dictionary-python/ It does not look like SEO spam to me. The site seems actually nice and well produced. I may be missing something, thou. Why is that page so bad that the author does not want it in the list of results?
    - philipwhiuk 3y ago
      If you grabbed a 'Java Basics' book, you would not expect the author to explain the entire implementation details of ArrayList before telling them about for-each. But somehow the author of this article thinks that this kind of unnecessary level of detail is appropriate.
- LordShredda 3y ago
  A book has an index, a bunch of sources at the end, and maybe a further reading section. The book tends to be more thorough since it doesn't have word limits or up votes to cater to. I wouldn't use the book example here as they tend to be more of a reference if not a how to guide for a very specific topic
liorben-david 3y ago
The proliferation of SEO fluff makes it way too convenient to use ChatGPT instead. I'm well aware of ChatGPT's ability to confidently say wrong things, but the cost of reading SEO fluff is so high I'm more than willing for that tradeoff. Interestingly I've found that GPT also tends to use SEO fluff, likely because its trained off SEO-fluffed content. The difference is that I can just tell ChatGPT to be concise and the fluff is gone
- ineedausername 3y ago
  Wait, do you just tell it "please be more concise" to whatever you ask of it?
  - liorben-david 3y ago
    100%. I preface all prompts with "Be concise and ask follow-up questions if you need more information" -- Greatly improves the output
  - rockemsockem 3y ago
    Not OP, but yeah if you tell it to be concise it will be. With GPT4 you can even prescribe a maximum number of sentences and probably words too (haven't tried this one specifically). It will do it. It's a great tool!
    - RobinL 3y ago
      With code questions I usually say: 'code only no explanation'. It gets a bit tiresome to type every time, but gpt4 is too slow to wait for it to 'type' the explanation
      - rockemsockem 3y ago
        Can't you seed a conversation with a prompt like that and then just ask your coding questions without retyping that every time?
- 3y ago
skilled 3y ago
The number one reason blogs do this is because of links, which are very hard to build. Actually, these days nobody gives a flying fuck about linking to anyone else’s site anymore and Google knows this. They’ve openly stated that they want to devalue backlinks as a ranking metric. So, what is the alternative? You plaster the page with an eBooks-worth of content because that satisfies Googles EAT (something something topical authority) signals. It’s that simple. In many ways you can steer Googles results in a direction but developers are too lazy to make a /link section on their blog and save a bookmark once in a while. It actually helps the people whose content you like and it costs you absolutely nothing.
userbinator 3y ago
I absolutely hate the SEO crap that shows up these days, so much that I've become accustomed to immediately scrolling down past the first few results. In contrast, I read all of K&R before writing a single C program, and when I had to learn PHP, I went to the official documentation (it was a downloadable .chm) and read through most of it first. It's a larger upfront investment, but I think taking the time to understand the language first instead of "JIT'ing" knowledge is worth it.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  While you're right, of course, it does depend on whether you expect to be spending enough time on the language to be worth the investment. Anecdotally, a lot of developers will switch technologies or languages every couple of months or years; there's few left who say "I am a $language developer" and stick with that for, say, a decade. So for them it doesn't feel worth investing the time. And also, googling for something has a high hit rate; nine times out of ten, googling 'how to sort in python' gives a good result. And also also, these questions are often one-off; you need to look up how to do X in $lang, then either you can copy / paste, or you never touch it again; why put in the time investment if you don't need to rely on your memory?
  - userbinator 3y ago
    a lot of developers will switch technologies or languages every couple of months or year That says more about the horrible state of the industry than anything else. Big languages like Python won't be disappearing anytime soon, so even if I might not be doing more of it for now, learning the language more thoroughly will pay off again in the future.
- rkagerer 3y ago
  I miss chm!
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
> How is this the number one link on Google? Because it's rich in content, it's long, has a table of contents, the whole site is relevant to the search query, etc etc etc; from a search engine's point of view, it's more authoritative than Stack Overflow where the authoritartativity (?) is debatable at best, decided by consensus otherwise. What should happen is that the community behind Python (in this case) works their ass off to make authoritative sources, like MDN did for web standards. And they had to work and fight for years to overtake w3schools.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  There are likely tons of blog posts that answer the specific question "python iterate over dictionary" and nothing else. Search engines long ago gained the ability to detect heuristically that a search query was in the form of a question, and they could easily detect that this is a programming syntax question, and de-prioritize pages with 7,000+ words.
TillE 3y ago
I've noticed the same thing recently: Googling for common programming stuff (in a language I don't normally use) will turn up results that usually answer the question, but they're bloated with preamble and filler. I wonder how far Google could get with manual curation. Like if they said, these sites (eg, Stack Overflow, official documentation) have been around forever and have high-quality content, let's crank up their rankings for the appropriate classes of queries. That has its own problems, but it's gotta be better than the status quo.
- bun_at_work 3y ago
  The thing is, even if Google _could_ they aren't incentivized to. They are more incentivized to show the ad-ridden content, because often the websites are using Google itself to display the ads. In the case described in the linked post, Google potentially benefits twice, financially. Why would they want to reduce their profit by showing the more relevant posts (those that quickly get to the answer)? I don't know though, maybe StackOverflow also uses Google for their ads, but a quick looks suggests they simply have less ads than the results above them in the article's example search.
johnfn 3y ago
I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but I think one of the most underrated advantages of ChatGPT is simply that it says everything in exactly the same tone and style. When I google for things, who knows what page I'm going to land on. It could be full of ads. It could have tons of content I have to parse before I get to what I care about, as said in OP. It could be written clunkily, in a way that's hard to parse, or it could be littered with spelling mistakes. It could be overly verbose, or explain things that I don't need to know. All this creates high variance in the actual time it takes to parse out what I need. When I ask ChatGPT it'll always give me the answer in a few paragraphs, and it's always written in the exact same way. What a boon! > How is this the number one link on Google? It's the number one link on Google because one proxy Google has to know if you got a result is that you lingered on the page for a long time. This is also, tangentially, why cooking recipe websites are so long. If you bounce immediately off a website, Google thinks that means that you didn't find it to be useful. ChatGPT does not have this problem.
- Maxion 3y ago
  Especially for these type of simple syntax questions that autocomplete or copilot isn’t getting. It’s so so quick to ask ChatGPT for the answer, rather than finding the documentation for the thing you’re looking for and parsing it.
- eastbound 3y ago
  Can’t wait until they (actually) monetize ChatGPT and maximize the time spent on the website, like Google. Can’t wait until ChatGPT says that, when their grandma went to school, they too needed to mentally add 26 + 13, and the teacher would always frown on pupils when they gave the answer 31. ChatGPT’s strength is that it’s new on the market, needs to build an audience, and therefore their UI and UX are lean, devoid of gaming. Same as Google, up until 2008.
  - johnfn 3y ago
    I'm not convinced this is the case. Unlike Google, ChatGPT has clear monetization channels which are not advertising, like ChatGPT+, which is already doing very well, and it's easy to imagine further channels which allow access to specialized models. Additionally, unlike Google, you can only really get away with making your service crappy when you have such a strong moat that it's still significantly better than the competition. The only moat OpenAI has is its model, which is proving a lot easier to replicate than Google circa 2008's moat.
altcognito 3y ago
Cheat sheets are the best for this sort of thing. Every language probably ought to have a set of them.
acaloiar 3y ago
I've been using Kagi [1] for both technical and non-technical searches recently, and not having to mentally filter ads out of results is a delight. The top result is almost always very good. [1] https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
- raybb 3y ago
  Also love being able to prioritize or downrank sites in results
  - acaloiar 3y ago
    I just discovered that yesterday, and loving it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
muscaw 3y ago
For cli calls, I have been using a handy website called cheat.sh Basically, just go to cheat.sh/git and you get a list of useful examples for how to use the git command. I have it mapped to a small bash function so that I can just type ‘cheat git’ and I get the content right in my terminal.
- S04dKHzrKT 3y ago
  A similar project is tldr. https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer
dvt 3y ago
This is literally above the fold[1]. The Python website linked is actually pretty good, what a dumb click-baity blog post. I'll probably get downvoted by the "I use ChatGPT daily and it 15x'ed my productivity" crowd, but every time I have this debate, I get zero salient examples. [1] https://imgur.com/a/KFJ9DrB https://imgur.com/a/KFJ9DrB
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  This post may contain erotic or adult imagery. By continuing, you acknowledge that you are 18+ years of age. I am declining your promise of erotic imagery but thanks for thinking of me.
  - Vecr 3y ago
    That's a boilerplate disclaimer. There's nothing in the image other than a screenshot of a webpage showing only text.
- Hikikomori 3y ago
  While search results have degraded OP certainly picked a bad example.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  The index was on page 2 on the authors screen, you probably have a bigger screen. But even if you click the link in the index, then you still need to scroll down two to three pages to get to the actual answer: for key in a_dict: print(key, '->', a_dict[key]) I don't know about you, but I think that an article title "How to Iterate Through a Dictionary in Python" should maybe start with that snippet, instead of first explaining over 9 pages: - "What dictionaries are, as well as some of their main features and implementation details" - "How to iterate through a dictionary in Python by using the basic tools the language offers" - "What kind of real-world tasks you can perform by iterating through a dictionary in Python" - "How to use some more advanced techniques and strategies to iterate through a dictionary in Python" Yes, if you spend 30 minutes reading the article, you will know how to iterate over dictionaries afterwards. But if you asked a human being, they would just say "for key in dict:". Edit: I tried sending the query "How to Iterate Through a Dictionary in Python" to ChatGPT, and it immediately shows relevant code samples that exactly answer the question, without pages of pointless filler: https://imgur.com/a/CenZFl0 https://imgur.com/a/CenZFl0 There's no arguing that the ChatGPT answer is a million times better.
egypturnash 3y ago
buy a book, use the index
cleandreams 3y ago
This is SEO. I read a food blogger on this. She had to make her recipes long, long, long with lots of fluff or it wouldn't get a good ranking. Google should stop this. It's just going to make ChatGPT more attractive.
gtirloni 3y ago
I felt it wasn't fair to say the Real Python page about iterating over dicts had "useless" content. It had a table of contents, what's wrong with that? It's going into detail about dictionaries. Sure, you just want a quick fix. That page is not for you but there is no need to caption a screenshot with "…so…much…nonsense". Nonsense is a bit extreme, isn't it?
- bornfreddy 3y ago
  Especially as realpython is one of the websites when looking for anything Python related. Their explanations are clear, concise and easy to read, not to mention that they usually cover the whole topic, not just some minor aspect of it (hello SO). When realpython is among the hits I know I don't need to look any further. (not affiliated in any way)
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > concise I believe the whole discussion here is about the site being anything but concise.
    - bornfreddy 3y ago
      However, I would argue it is concise. It just doesn't limit the page to a single subtopic / subquestion that someone might ask, but instead covers the whole topic. Feel free to skip most of it and take just solution to the problem at hand (index is usually great for this purpose).
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  Not really when the "Introduction to Dictionaries", which doesn't belong on an article about how to iterate through them, is 20 paragraphs long. If you want to write an article on Python dictionaries, sure spend 20 paragraphs on it. But don't title the article "How to iterate through a dictionary" I'm surprised they didn't spend another twenty describing the origination of term iterate from the original Latin 'iterum'.
lkgnabc 3y ago
If you know the sites that have the answers, it takes 5 seconds to get them. Far faster than wading through the verbose and insufferable output of some chatbot and your give the source of all that knowledge some recognition.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
25 years in, how is it possible not to have mastered this like muscle memory? You're supposed to develop skills to quickly assess search results, scan a site for trustworthiness, find the info you need on a page through heuristics you've either been building for decades or have developed natively because you were born into a world where it's a primary skill. It's become like breathing, hasn't it? I can't begin to describe how much it slows me down to have to keep typing out my question repeatedly to an AI, only to be robbed of the ability to judge the information in the context of where it came from, and oh yeah, any confidence that it's accurate.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  It’s fun to ask ChatGPT CSS questions because you can quickly try them out and see if they work. So far it has a .000 batting average on CSS for me.
- antihipocrat 3y ago
  Younger people haven't had the same time to build these heuristics. Some of these heuristics you're utilizing may also be referencing what information looked like prior to the influx of blog spam.
  - jdsalaro 3y ago
    > Younger people haven't had the same time to build these heuristics. This is a key point, and I don't think the ability to acquire knowledge online is a skill which only young people specifically have failed to acquire. Said ability must be trained on, as with anything, a suitable dataset. This objective cannot be meaningfully achieved if all data sources someone has ever consumed and learned from are TikTok, ragebait, clickbait, affiliate link blogs, email chains, WhatsApp message chains, sensationalist news outlets, etc. This is why people still fall for the Nigerian Prince, Hot MILFs in Your Area, job application with deposit and all the modern variants; not only old people but all types of people. I think some of us nerds have a slight advantage in that we experience the internet early on in a slightly different way: as a parallel to the real world, with friends and foes, with truth and deceit and as a playground to write a game mod or a bot for shit and giggles. We are, due to that I'd pose, much more keen to learn how and be able to effectively navigate it.
BestGuess 3y ago
Don't know if it helps but some people sent me these and I think it might help https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ Think it got posted here couple times? found one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18989922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18989922 I don't know if anyone asked and I don't know if it can be figured out but I was wonderin are the bots any better than figuring out them search operators?
thyrox 3y ago
The longer you stay on a webpage, the more favorably Google perceives it. Even if you're frustrated sifting through spam, if you find your answer quickly and spend less time, it doesn't count as a positive quality signal. To counter this, websites employ a strategy known as the "Bucket brigade" to ensure you spend at least 30 seconds on their site. It's a basic principle of website optimization and it's just the tip of the nasty SEO iceberg.
blindseer 3y ago
People that are saying this is SEO, in my opinion, haven't read or used RealPython. It is genuinely one of the best Python learning websites out there. Their articles are written by people knowledgeable in the field, and usually comprehensive and thorough, while still being easy to understand. I also think Google's ranking is fair in this case, assuming you want to know most high quality information about "how to iterate through a dictionary". I certainly would prefer this kind of a RealPython article with a table of contents so that I can find exactly what I am looking for. I do think Google (and the web in general) has started to suck because of SEO spam, and generally agree with the authors premise. Searching for recipes suck, searching for reviews suck, searching for places and events also suck. I just think this particular instance is a bad example. RealPython values your time, and I wish there were a lot more websites that valued my time too.
- elicksaur 3y ago
  When looking for Python questions, it honestly ranks above any random StackOverflow link or the docs for me. The detailed table of contents with links that the author labels “…so…much…nonsense”, is actually the kind of precise “take me to exactly what I want to know quickly” solution they seem to yearn for.
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    Right, I’m genuinely confused about what the author thinks would be better than that table of contents. I guess they wanted an answer to their specific question and absolutely nothing else? That might work for something as simple as “iterate through a dictionary” but in many other cases the full context is useful so you can figure out for yourself whether the immediate answer actually solves your problem.
    - philipwhiuk 3y ago
      If the author wanted to write "How to do absolutely anything with a dictionary" they should have titled the article that. Was the first 20 paragraphs on what a dictionary is really useful? No, it's unnecessary verbiage that anyone clicking on an article with the title knows.
IshKebab 3y ago
> And I know the reason - ads and SEO. Wrong! At least in the case of Python. The main reason Python search results are so bad is that the official documentation is really badly organised. People literally can't find the answers they want there because everything is on one mega-page with a bunch of unrelated concepts. So Google ranks it badly. The author's example ("python iterate over dictionary") is a good one. I tried that search - doc.python.org is NOT IN THE RESULTS (at least for the first 3 pages). It's not hard to see why - the closest answer I could find is here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#looping-techniques https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#loopi... but it's on a page that also talks about lists, tuples, assignment expressions, nested list comprehensions, etc. No wonder people don't want to read all that! And it doesn't even answer the question what `for x in somedict:` does - for that you have to go to this mega-page: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#typesmapping https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#typesmapping and see that `iter()` is "a shortcut for iter(d.keys())". Compare it to Rust "rust iterate over hashmap". The 4th result is https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.htm... It's just about hashmaps. The example at the top has iteration over one.
earthboundkid 3y ago
Real Python is a great site. Why are we reading someone who can’t tell good content from bad content?
LatticeAnimal 3y ago
Should have 2020 in the title
amanzi 3y ago
I'm sure there's an argument to be made about SEO fluff dominating Google, but this article picked a bad example to prove their point. The author searched for: "python iterate over dict". The number 1 result was an article called: "How to Iterate Through a Dictionary in Python". The article doesn't have obnoxious ads, has a clear table of contents at the top so you can jump to specific sections if you don't need the full context, and is written in a way that novices can learn the topic while still providing all the technical details that an advanced user would need. Also, I'm not sure what resolution screen the author is using (1280x768?), but on my 1080p screen I can see the top of the table of contents so could jump straight to any of the methods to iterate through a dictionary. In my opinion, this is an example of Google providing a great result.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  > and is written in a way that novices can learn the topic If you're a novice you start with "what is a dictionary" which is where the first half of the article belongs.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
dragonwriter 3y ago
Better title: “not knowing what a table of contents is costs you time” (the one article that this entire piece rests on has a table of contents at the top, but the author counts page down keystrokes to get to a heading that you could get to from there with one click.)
FrenchyJiby 3y ago
I highly recommend using local solutions to this local issue: Zeal[1] (aka Dash[2] on MacOS) Load up the "docsets" of your languages (lightly edited HTML docs for indexing purposes) and use a global keyboard shortcut (F8 for me) to pull up Python/Postgres/Terraform docs, searching for the right function without internet query. This isn't straight up applicable to all questions of course, but "How do I search regular expressions in Python again?" is now as easy as <F8> "re" <ENTER> Note that the docsets can be converted from normal HTML ones via doc2dash[3], especially useful to load up custom docs like private providers. [1]: https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/ [2]: https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash [3]: https://doc2dash.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/ https://doc2dash.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  Is there something like this for Linux?
  - jdrek1 3y ago
    Zeal works on Linux.
fidla 3y ago
Which is why I tend to use perplexity AI
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Use the right tool for the job. If you're learning Python, purchase a reference work and use it. Or bookmark a fairly decent Python reference online. If you're learning a particular tool, then the vendor has written documentation for it, e.g. Splunk or Linux manpages. Bypass Google and go right to the vendor. It should be a required step when learning something--anything--that you learn some good sources for its documentation first, so that you're not blindly Googling or LLMing around for random bad answers. I notice others downthread discussing recipes. The first thing I did when learning to cook was to find just a few reliable sources for cooking techniques and recipes. I collected a few YouTube channels and I realized that WikiHow is a really good, spam-free site that teaches technique and also provides basic recipes. And so I just stopped Googling "how to bake lamb rib chops" because that's a fool's errand.
eviks 3y ago
> but it takes NINE PAGE DOWN keystrokes just to get to the section called ‘the basics’. Or it takes one click on a relevant item in the table of contents
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  Not really when even then they add more cruft, desiring to explain the entire implementation internals of Python before finally giving you the answer.
  - eviks 3y ago
    nope, that's another fail at basic info navigation, you see there are 4 basic ways right in the TOC, and then jumping into either of those 4 ways you get the example in a clearly different formatting, so you don't even need to read the "cruft", and only for the first of these 3 ways you need to scroll a bit for the answer
motbus3 3y ago
I bet internally they discussed a billion times to have Google premium results.
copperx 3y ago
This post didn't age well, and it's only 3 years old.
phendrenad2 3y ago
People act like this is inevitable, like the Google-vs-SEO cat and mouse game has been finally, authoritatively won by SEO. But I see it differently, I think that Google has stopped fighting back against SEO. Using Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" theory [1], they are now in the final phase, where they screw everyone over and burn their product to the ground in exchange for temporary cost savings. Google has never had a serious competitor, so there's a huge moat to fill before they have to worry about losing market share. [1] - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
justanother_guy 3y ago
This might be a controversial opinion, but I think if anyone deserves to charge enterprise clients for API it should be Wikipedia.
- miyuru 3y ago
  they already do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/ https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/
mrkramer 3y ago
It's called opportunity cost; while you are scrolling through blue links that all look the same and clicking mindlessly on them, maybe there was other better and more efficient way to look up and find useful information.
bovermyer 3y ago
I think I'm going to start documenting more of what I learn on my own website. As it is I have a few notes on a variety of topics, but nothing about the structure of specific languages. I always end up forgetting how to do X if I haven't done X in awhile, so having it documented by an author I trust in a no-nonsense place I have ready access to is useful.
- landgenoot 3y ago
  Yes please, and please keep the website JavaScript and ad free. Put _some_ effort in SEO I'm amazed by how well very specific answers become top 3 results. Last week, I wondered how to parse a BCC recipient using Cloudflare Email workers myself. Wrote a blog post about it, and 5 days later it is the first result when googling for: parse bcc recipient Cloudflare email workers

126 points by mleonhard 3y ago

DuckDuckGo gives me a relevant StackOverflow as the first result. Furthermore, it displays it on the actual search page, on the right-hand side.

jacobxu 3y ago

thats why chatgpt works so well, it literally replaced google for searching basic syntax

marginalia_nu 3y ago
It works really well for questions that have easy answers and that are asked a lot. It works less well when you have a question that doesn't have an obvious answer. For fun, try 'How can I write to a Parquet file in Java without Hadoop?'. It will vacillate between giving answers that pull in hadoop dependencies, and nonsense that doesn't compile at all. (here's a useful proper answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59939309/read-local-parquet-file-without-hadoop-path-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59939309/read-local-parq...)
- Closi 3y ago
  It also works well for questions that have easy/medium answers and aren’t asked a lot. Complex questions that involve things that aren’t well documented are obviously going to be harder for an LLM to answer, particularly when the LLM does not have a capability to test its own code.
- joebiden2 3y ago
  That's ChatGPT-4's response to that question: https://chat.openai.com/share/72d490a9-2b2a-4120-9bb0-3a59d417a41e https://chat.openai.com/share/72d490a9-2b2a-4120-9bb0-3a59d4... I briefly checked if the mentioned dependencies exist (they do). Too late over here to actually try the code.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Main.java:27:33 java: org.apache.parquet.io.OutputFile is abstract; cannot be instantiated Main.java:29:17 java: cannot access org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path class file for org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path not found It basically solves the problem by not importing hadoop dependencies (despite needing to), and hallucinating classes.

raldi 3y ago

This article was written in 2020 and it shows. I type these queries into an LLM now and 95% of the time within seconds it outputs outstanding answers.

LordShredda 3y ago
If you have such simple questions then thanks for not wasting people's time on stackoverflow
- raldi 3y ago
  It works for impressively difficult questions, but even for simple ones (like this article is about) they would surely already be already answered a decade ago on Stack Overflow so there would be no need to ask them anew.

cratermoon 3y ago

Cooking sites have been this way for a long time. Google for a recipe for something simple and the top results are long articles about the foods, the process, and so on. At least the better cooking sites put a link to the recipe near the top.

version_five 3y ago

I take the point, but a developer with any experience is able to use google as a portal to get to the relevant SO or documentation page very quickly in spite of whatever shenanigans google+seo tries. It's not like every time you google some syntax you're actually distracted by tutorialspoint or whatever garbage. These sites must just feed on people who are in the first day or two of their careers, after that you don't even seen them.

inetknght 3y ago
> a developer with any experience is able to use google as a portal to get to the relevant SO That's mostly because SO search is (or, has historically been) terrible. > or documentation page Ironically, documentation pages exist and many of them are terrible. But even the great ones aren't linked to in code snippets. Got a squiggly line? It would be handy to have a link to documentation!
- bornfreddy 3y ago
  > That's mostly because SO search is (or, has historically been) terrible. It still is. There is a trick though - start typing a new question and it will suggest you possible duplicates. Works like magic, they really did a great job with this "search".

willsmith72 3y ago

100% agréé, and not just on programming searches. That's why it's so easy for my to justify gpt plus to myself. Could be programming questions, holiday planning, business advice. Just about anything

reaperman 3y ago

> * But to me, the user, it feels like I’m paying for my answers with my time pointlessly scrolling around the page to find the answer I came to the site for. I can’t stand it; I feel like I am being duped, misled, being taken for a ride, just so I know how to make pancakes, or how to do a simple thing in common programming language.* Absolutely agree with this. I strongly prefer reading the official language API documentation directly, which makes me very sensitive to the quality of the documentation. I have also replaced my google searches (which usually are more along the lines of “what’s the most idiomatic way to do x?” or “what’s the most correct way to do x in $LANG?”) with ChatGPT. It’s super fast, generally pretty good for the types of style questions you’d usually have learning a new language, and I can directly query it about what tradeoffs different techniques have in various common situations. ChatGPT has finally gotten me off Google’s Wild Ride.

Shawnj2 3y ago
I like to use the Bing AI for that because ChatGPT can sometimes hallucinate while Bing will use its knowledge + stuff from websites which makes it a more reliable source for things which should match reality.
- reaperman 3y ago
  On the contrary, I find all the LLMs (including ChatGPT browsing beta) which search to find answers repeat the same blogspam as everyone else. They save time by parsing the blogspam for me, but it’s still low quality. Phind gets an honorable mention though - if that’s the style you prefer I’d strongly recommend it. ChatGPT does hallucinate all the time, but for “learning a language from scratch” it’s very very very minimal. I can’t recall a single time it gave me a response to “idiomatic way to do x in $LANG” which included hallucinated information. Just can’t back it into a corner trying to get it to customize something that needs rigorous optimization for your use case. Overall, the large innate knowledge base of ChatGPT-4 seems to contain a great model of the modern features of most programming languages and their packages (popular PyPI packages, Spring, Boost, Qt, etc, etc). Once I let it browse the internet, quality goes down and roughly matches Bing and Bard. Phind I think gets around this by having a custom ranking of sources or something. Not sure what their secret sauce is but it mostly works pretty well.

hourago 3y ago

By the author's metric is even worse to read a book. If you are looking for the exact answer to your exact code maybe that is the problem. To get free training so you can solve your problem yourself and understand the overall situation seems a very good deal. The example to complain about seems very badly chosen. I think that Google is getting worse and that advertisements in webpages should be regulated. But to complain that you are being taught to fish instead of given a fish seems too entitled.

TillE 3y ago
There's a world of difference between a well-written, well-edited book and SEO spam. The latter is not making a genuine attempt to actually teach you, that's not the point.
- hourago 3y ago
  This is the link: https://realpython.com/iterate-through-dictionary-python/ https://realpython.com/iterate-through-dictionary-python/ It does not look like SEO spam to me. The site seems actually nice and well produced. I may be missing something, thou. Why is that page so bad that the author does not want it in the list of results?
  - philipwhiuk 3y ago
    If you grabbed a 'Java Basics' book, you would not expect the author to explain the entire implementation details of ArrayList before telling them about for-each. But somehow the author of this article thinks that this kind of unnecessary level of detail is appropriate.
LordShredda 3y ago
A book has an index, a bunch of sources at the end, and maybe a further reading section. The book tends to be more thorough since it doesn't have word limits or up votes to cater to. I wouldn't use the book example here as they tend to be more of a reference if not a how to guide for a very specific topic

liorben-david 3y ago

The proliferation of SEO fluff makes it way too convenient to use ChatGPT instead. I'm well aware of ChatGPT's ability to confidently say wrong things, but the cost of reading SEO fluff is so high I'm more than willing for that tradeoff. Interestingly I've found that GPT also tends to use SEO fluff, likely because its trained off SEO-fluffed content. The difference is that I can just tell ChatGPT to be concise and the fluff is gone

ineedausername 3y ago
Wait, do you just tell it "please be more concise" to whatever you ask of it?
- liorben-david 3y ago
  100%. I preface all prompts with "Be concise and ask follow-up questions if you need more information" -- Greatly improves the output
- rockemsockem 3y ago
  Not OP, but yeah if you tell it to be concise it will be. With GPT4 you can even prescribe a maximum number of sentences and probably words too (haven't tried this one specifically). It will do it. It's a great tool!
  - RobinL 3y ago
    With code questions I usually say: 'code only no explanation'. It gets a bit tiresome to type every time, but gpt4 is too slow to wait for it to 'type' the explanation
    - rockemsockem 3y ago
      Can't you seed a conversation with a prompt like that and then just ask your coding questions without retyping that every time?
3y ago

skilled 3y ago

The number one reason blogs do this is because of links, which are very hard to build. Actually, these days nobody gives a flying fuck about linking to anyone else’s site anymore and Google knows this. They’ve openly stated that they want to devalue backlinks as a ranking metric. So, what is the alternative? You plaster the page with an eBooks-worth of content because that satisfies Googles EAT (something something topical authority) signals. It’s that simple. In many ways you can steer Googles results in a direction but developers are too lazy to make a /link section on their blog and save a bookmark once in a while. It actually helps the people whose content you like and it costs you absolutely nothing.

userbinator 3y ago

I absolutely hate the SEO crap that shows up these days, so much that I've become accustomed to immediately scrolling down past the first few results. In contrast, I read all of K&R before writing a single C program, and when I had to learn PHP, I went to the official documentation (it was a downloadable .chm) and read through most of it first. It's a larger upfront investment, but I think taking the time to understand the language first instead of "JIT'ing" knowledge is worth it.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
While you're right, of course, it does depend on whether you expect to be spending enough time on the language to be worth the investment. Anecdotally, a lot of developers will switch technologies or languages every couple of months or years; there's few left who say "I am a $language developer" and stick with that for, say, a decade. So for them it doesn't feel worth investing the time. And also, googling for something has a high hit rate; nine times out of ten, googling 'how to sort in python' gives a good result. And also also, these questions are often one-off; you need to look up how to do X in $lang, then either you can copy / paste, or you never touch it again; why put in the time investment if you don't need to rely on your memory?
- userbinator 3y ago
  a lot of developers will switch technologies or languages every couple of months or year That says more about the horrible state of the industry than anything else. Big languages like Python won't be disappearing anytime soon, so even if I might not be doing more of it for now, learning the language more thoroughly will pay off again in the future.
rkagerer 3y ago
I miss chm!

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

> How is this the number one link on Google? Because it's rich in content, it's long, has a table of contents, the whole site is relevant to the search query, etc etc etc; from a search engine's point of view, it's more authoritative than Stack Overflow where the authoritartativity (?) is debatable at best, decided by consensus otherwise. What should happen is that the community behind Python (in this case) works their ass off to make authoritative sources, like MDN did for web standards. And they had to work and fight for years to overtake w3schools.

phendrenad2 3y ago
There are likely tons of blog posts that answer the specific question "python iterate over dictionary" and nothing else. Search engines long ago gained the ability to detect heuristically that a search query was in the form of a question, and they could easily detect that this is a programming syntax question, and de-prioritize pages with 7,000+ words.

TillE 3y ago

I've noticed the same thing recently: Googling for common programming stuff (in a language I don't normally use) will turn up results that usually answer the question, but they're bloated with preamble and filler. I wonder how far Google could get with manual curation. Like if they said, these sites (eg, Stack Overflow, official documentation) have been around forever and have high-quality content, let's crank up their rankings for the appropriate classes of queries. That has its own problems, but it's gotta be better than the status quo.

bun_at_work 3y ago
The thing is, even if Google _could_ they aren't incentivized to. They are more incentivized to show the ad-ridden content, because often the websites are using Google itself to display the ads. In the case described in the linked post, Google potentially benefits twice, financially. Why would they want to reduce their profit by showing the more relevant posts (those that quickly get to the answer)? I don't know though, maybe StackOverflow also uses Google for their ads, but a quick looks suggests they simply have less ads than the results above them in the article's example search.

johnfn 3y ago

I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but I think one of the most underrated advantages of ChatGPT is simply that it says everything in exactly the same tone and style. When I google for things, who knows what page I'm going to land on. It could be full of ads. It could have tons of content I have to parse before I get to what I care about, as said in OP. It could be written clunkily, in a way that's hard to parse, or it could be littered with spelling mistakes. It could be overly verbose, or explain things that I don't need to know. All this creates high variance in the actual time it takes to parse out what I need. When I ask ChatGPT it'll always give me the answer in a few paragraphs, and it's always written in the exact same way. What a boon! > How is this the number one link on Google? It's the number one link on Google because one proxy Google has to know if you got a result is that you lingered on the page for a long time. This is also, tangentially, why cooking recipe websites are so long. If you bounce immediately off a website, Google thinks that means that you didn't find it to be useful. ChatGPT does not have this problem.

Maxion 3y ago
Especially for these type of simple syntax questions that autocomplete or copilot isn’t getting. It’s so so quick to ask ChatGPT for the answer, rather than finding the documentation for the thing you’re looking for and parsing it.
eastbound 3y ago
Can’t wait until they (actually) monetize ChatGPT and maximize the time spent on the website, like Google. Can’t wait until ChatGPT says that, when their grandma went to school, they too needed to mentally add 26 + 13, and the teacher would always frown on pupils when they gave the answer 31. ChatGPT’s strength is that it’s new on the market, needs to build an audience, and therefore their UI and UX are lean, devoid of gaming. Same as Google, up until 2008.
- johnfn 3y ago
  I'm not convinced this is the case. Unlike Google, ChatGPT has clear monetization channels which are not advertising, like ChatGPT+, which is already doing very well, and it's easy to imagine further channels which allow access to specialized models. Additionally, unlike Google, you can only really get away with making your service crappy when you have such a strong moat that it's still significantly better than the competition. The only moat OpenAI has is its model, which is proving a lot easier to replicate than Google circa 2008's moat.

altcognito 3y ago

Cheat sheets are the best for this sort of thing. Every language probably ought to have a set of them.

acaloiar 3y ago

I've been using Kagi [1] for both technical and non-technical searches recently, and not having to mentally filter ads out of results is a delight. The top result is almost always very good. [1] https://kagi.com https://kagi.com

raybb 3y ago
Also love being able to prioritize or downrank sites in results
- acaloiar 3y ago
  I just discovered that yesterday, and loving it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

muscaw 3y ago

For cli calls, I have been using a handy website called cheat.sh Basically, just go to cheat.sh/git and you get a list of useful examples for how to use the git command. I have it mapped to a small bash function so that I can just type ‘cheat git’ and I get the content right in my terminal.

S04dKHzrKT 3y ago
A similar project is tldr. https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer

dvt 3y ago

This is literally above the fold[1]. The Python website linked is actually pretty good, what a dumb click-baity blog post. I'll probably get downvoted by the "I use ChatGPT daily and it 15x'ed my productivity" crowd, but every time I have this debate, I get zero salient examples. [1] https://imgur.com/a/KFJ9DrB https://imgur.com/a/KFJ9DrB

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
This post may contain erotic or adult imagery. By continuing, you acknowledge that you are 18+ years of age. I am declining your promise of erotic imagery but thanks for thinking of me.
- Vecr 3y ago
  That's a boilerplate disclaimer. There's nothing in the image other than a screenshot of a webpage showing only text.
Hikikomori 3y ago
While search results have degraded OP certainly picked a bad example.
newaccount74 3y ago
The index was on page 2 on the authors screen, you probably have a bigger screen. But even if you click the link in the index, then you still need to scroll down two to three pages to get to the actual answer: for key in a_dict: print(key, '->', a_dict[key]) I don't know about you, but I think that an article title "How to Iterate Through a Dictionary in Python" should maybe start with that snippet, instead of first explaining over 9 pages: - "What dictionaries are, as well as some of their main features and implementation details" - "How to iterate through a dictionary in Python by using the basic tools the language offers" - "What kind of real-world tasks you can perform by iterating through a dictionary in Python" - "How to use some more advanced techniques and strategies to iterate through a dictionary in Python" Yes, if you spend 30 minutes reading the article, you will know how to iterate over dictionaries afterwards. But if you asked a human being, they would just say "for key in dict:". Edit: I tried sending the query "How to Iterate Through a Dictionary in Python" to ChatGPT, and it immediately shows relevant code samples that exactly answer the question, without pages of pointless filler: https://imgur.com/a/CenZFl0 https://imgur.com/a/CenZFl0 There's no arguing that the ChatGPT answer is a million times better.

egypturnash 3y ago

buy a book, use the index

cleandreams 3y ago

This is SEO. I read a food blogger on this. She had to make her recipes long, long, long with lots of fluff or it wouldn't get a good ranking. Google should stop this. It's just going to make ChatGPT more attractive.

gtirloni 3y ago

I felt it wasn't fair to say the Real Python page about iterating over dicts had "useless" content. It had a table of contents, what's wrong with that? It's going into detail about dictionaries. Sure, you just want a quick fix. That page is not for you but there is no need to caption a screenshot with "…so…much…nonsense". Nonsense is a bit extreme, isn't it?

bornfreddy 3y ago
Especially as realpython is one of the websites when looking for anything Python related. Their explanations are clear, concise and easy to read, not to mention that they usually cover the whole topic, not just some minor aspect of it (hello SO). When realpython is among the hits I know I don't need to look any further. (not affiliated in any way)
- nottorp 3y ago
  > concise I believe the whole discussion here is about the site being anything but concise.
  - bornfreddy 3y ago
    However, I would argue it is concise. It just doesn't limit the page to a single subtopic / subquestion that someone might ask, but instead covers the whole topic. Feel free to skip most of it and take just solution to the problem at hand (index is usually great for this purpose).
philipwhiuk 3y ago
Not really when the "Introduction to Dictionaries", which doesn't belong on an article about how to iterate through them, is 20 paragraphs long. If you want to write an article on Python dictionaries, sure spend 20 paragraphs on it. But don't title the article "How to iterate through a dictionary" I'm surprised they didn't spend another twenty describing the origination of term iterate from the original Latin 'iterum'.

lkgnabc 3y ago

If you know the sites that have the answers, it takes 5 seconds to get them. Far faster than wading through the verbose and insufferable output of some chatbot and your give the source of all that knowledge some recognition.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

25 years in, how is it possible not to have mastered this like muscle memory? You're supposed to develop skills to quickly assess search results, scan a site for trustworthiness, find the info you need on a page through heuristics you've either been building for decades or have developed natively because you were born into a world where it's a primary skill. It's become like breathing, hasn't it? I can't begin to describe how much it slows me down to have to keep typing out my question repeatedly to an AI, only to be robbed of the ability to judge the information in the context of where it came from, and oh yeah, any confidence that it's accurate.

earthboundkid 3y ago
It’s fun to ask ChatGPT CSS questions because you can quickly try them out and see if they work. So far it has a .000 batting average on CSS for me.
antihipocrat 3y ago
Younger people haven't had the same time to build these heuristics. Some of these heuristics you're utilizing may also be referencing what information looked like prior to the influx of blog spam.
- jdsalaro 3y ago
  > Younger people haven't had the same time to build these heuristics. This is a key point, and I don't think the ability to acquire knowledge online is a skill which only young people specifically have failed to acquire. Said ability must be trained on, as with anything, a suitable dataset. This objective cannot be meaningfully achieved if all data sources someone has ever consumed and learned from are TikTok, ragebait, clickbait, affiliate link blogs, email chains, WhatsApp message chains, sensationalist news outlets, etc. This is why people still fall for the Nigerian Prince, Hot MILFs in Your Area, job application with deposit and all the modern variants; not only old people but all types of people. I think some of us nerds have a slight advantage in that we experience the internet early on in a slightly different way: as a parallel to the real world, with friends and foes, with truth and deceit and as a playground to write a game mod or a bot for shit and giggles. We are, due to that I'd pose, much more keen to learn how and be able to effectively navigate it.

BestGuess 3y ago

Don't know if it helps but some people sent me these and I think it might help https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ Think it got posted here couple times? found one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18989922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18989922 I don't know if anyone asked and I don't know if it can be figured out but I was wonderin are the bots any better than figuring out them search operators?

thyrox 3y ago

The longer you stay on a webpage, the more favorably Google perceives it. Even if you're frustrated sifting through spam, if you find your answer quickly and spend less time, it doesn't count as a positive quality signal. To counter this, websites employ a strategy known as the "Bucket brigade" to ensure you spend at least 30 seconds on their site. It's a basic principle of website optimization and it's just the tip of the nasty SEO iceberg.

blindseer 3y ago

People that are saying this is SEO, in my opinion, haven't read or used RealPython. It is genuinely one of the best Python learning websites out there. Their articles are written by people knowledgeable in the field, and usually comprehensive and thorough, while still being easy to understand. I also think Google's ranking is fair in this case, assuming you want to know most high quality information about "how to iterate through a dictionary". I certainly would prefer this kind of a RealPython article with a table of contents so that I can find exactly what I am looking for. I do think Google (and the web in general) has started to suck because of SEO spam, and generally agree with the authors premise. Searching for recipes suck, searching for reviews suck, searching for places and events also suck. I just think this particular instance is a bad example. RealPython values your time, and I wish there were a lot more websites that valued my time too.

elicksaur 3y ago
When looking for Python questions, it honestly ranks above any random StackOverflow link or the docs for me. The detailed table of contents with links that the author labels “…so…much…nonsense”, is actually the kind of precise “take me to exactly what I want to know quickly” solution they seem to yearn for.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Right, I’m genuinely confused about what the author thinks would be better than that table of contents. I guess they wanted an answer to their specific question and absolutely nothing else? That might work for something as simple as “iterate through a dictionary” but in many other cases the full context is useful so you can figure out for yourself whether the immediate answer actually solves your problem.
  - philipwhiuk 3y ago
    If the author wanted to write "How to do absolutely anything with a dictionary" they should have titled the article that. Was the first 20 paragraphs on what a dictionary is really useful? No, it's unnecessary verbiage that anyone clicking on an article with the title knows.

IshKebab 3y ago

> And I know the reason - ads and SEO. Wrong! At least in the case of Python. The main reason Python search results are so bad is that the official documentation is really badly organised. People literally can't find the answers they want there because everything is on one mega-page with a bunch of unrelated concepts. So Google ranks it badly. The author's example ("python iterate over dictionary") is a good one. I tried that search - doc.python.org is NOT IN THE RESULTS (at least for the first 3 pages). It's not hard to see why - the closest answer I could find is here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#looping-techniques https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#loopi... but it's on a page that also talks about lists, tuples, assignment expressions, nested list comprehensions, etc. No wonder people don't want to read all that! And it doesn't even answer the question what `for x in somedict:` does - for that you have to go to this mega-page: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#typesmapping https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#typesmapping and see that `iter()` is "a shortcut for iter(d.keys())". Compare it to Rust "rust iterate over hashmap". The 4th result is https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.HashMap.htm... It's just about hashmaps. The example at the top has iteration over one.

earthboundkid 3y ago

Real Python is a great site. Why are we reading someone who can’t tell good content from bad content?

LatticeAnimal 3y ago

Should have 2020 in the title

amanzi 3y ago

I'm sure there's an argument to be made about SEO fluff dominating Google, but this article picked a bad example to prove their point. The author searched for: "python iterate over dict". The number 1 result was an article called: "How to Iterate Through a Dictionary in Python". The article doesn't have obnoxious ads, has a clear table of contents at the top so you can jump to specific sections if you don't need the full context, and is written in a way that novices can learn the topic while still providing all the technical details that an advanced user would need. Also, I'm not sure what resolution screen the author is using (1280x768?), but on my 1080p screen I can see the top of the table of contents so could jump straight to any of the methods to iterate through a dictionary. In my opinion, this is an example of Google providing a great result.

philipwhiuk 3y ago
> and is written in a way that novices can learn the topic If you're a novice you start with "what is a dictionary" which is where the first half of the article belongs.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

dragonwriter 3y ago

Better title: “not knowing what a table of contents is costs you time” (the one article that this entire piece rests on has a table of contents at the top, but the author counts page down keystrokes to get to a heading that you could get to from there with one click.)

FrenchyJiby 3y ago

I highly recommend using local solutions to this local issue: Zeal[1] (aka Dash[2] on MacOS) Load up the "docsets" of your languages (lightly edited HTML docs for indexing purposes) and use a global keyboard shortcut (F8 for me) to pull up Python/Postgres/Terraform docs, searching for the right function without internet query. This isn't straight up applicable to all questions of course, but "How do I search regular expressions in Python again?" is now as easy as <F8> "re" <ENTER> Note that the docsets can be converted from normal HTML ones via doc2dash[3], especially useful to load up custom docs like private providers. [1]: https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/ [2]: https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash [3]: https://doc2dash.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/ https://doc2dash.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/

CameronNemo 3y ago
Is there something like this for Linux?
- jdrek1 3y ago
  Zeal works on Linux.

fidla 3y ago

Which is why I tend to use perplexity AI

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

Use the right tool for the job. If you're learning Python, purchase a reference work and use it. Or bookmark a fairly decent Python reference online. If you're learning a particular tool, then the vendor has written documentation for it, e.g. Splunk or Linux manpages. Bypass Google and go right to the vendor. It should be a required step when learning something--anything--that you learn some good sources for its documentation first, so that you're not blindly Googling or LLMing around for random bad answers. I notice others downthread discussing recipes. The first thing I did when learning to cook was to find just a few reliable sources for cooking techniques and recipes. I collected a few YouTube channels and I realized that WikiHow is a really good, spam-free site that teaches technique and also provides basic recipes. And so I just stopped Googling "how to bake lamb rib chops" because that's a fool's errand.

eviks 3y ago

> but it takes NINE PAGE DOWN keystrokes just to get to the section called ‘the basics’. Or it takes one click on a relevant item in the table of contents

philipwhiuk 3y ago
Not really when even then they add more cruft, desiring to explain the entire implementation internals of Python before finally giving you the answer.
- eviks 3y ago
  nope, that's another fail at basic info navigation, you see there are 4 basic ways right in the TOC, and then jumping into either of those 4 ways you get the example in a clearly different formatting, so you don't even need to read the "cruft", and only for the first of these 3 ways you need to scroll a bit for the answer

motbus3 3y ago

I bet internally they discussed a billion times to have Google premium results.

copperx 3y ago

This post didn't age well, and it's only 3 years old.

phendrenad2 3y ago

People act like this is inevitable, like the Google-vs-SEO cat and mouse game has been finally, authoritatively won by SEO. But I see it differently, I think that Google has stopped fighting back against SEO. Using Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" theory [1], they are now in the final phase, where they screw everyone over and burn their product to the ground in exchange for temporary cost savings. Google has never had a serious competitor, so there's a huge moat to fill before they have to worry about losing market share. [1] - https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

justanother_guy 3y ago

This might be a controversial opinion, but I think if anyone deserves to charge enterprise clients for API it should be Wikipedia.

miyuru 3y ago
they already do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/ https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/

mrkramer 3y ago

It's called opportunity cost; while you are scrolling through blue links that all look the same and clicking mindlessly on them, maybe there was other better and more efficient way to look up and find useful information.

bovermyer 3y ago

I think I'm going to start documenting more of what I learn on my own website. As it is I have a few notes on a variety of topics, but nothing about the structure of specific languages. I always end up forgetting how to do X if I haven't done X in awhile, so having it documented by an author I trust in a no-nonsense place I have ready access to is useful.

landgenoot 3y ago
Yes please, and please keep the website JavaScript and ad free. Put _some_ effort in SEO I'm amazed by how well very specific answers become top 3 results. Last week, I wondered how to parse a BCC recipient using Cloudflare Email workers myself. Wrote a blog post about it, and 5 days later it is the first result when googling for: parse bcc recipient Cloudflare email workers