Ask HN: What happened to Google's programming-related search results?

Historically, Googling tech questions would yield a link to the appropriate section of the official documentation, relevant posts from Stack* or personal tech blogs, and maybe a wikipedia/c2 article.

However, as of late (~past 6 months), 30-50% of the results are w3schools-esque sites like "tutorialspoint.com", "thegeekdiary.com", "cyberciti.biz", "geeksforgeeks.org", "thegeekstuff.com", "appdividend.com"... all providing some ugly, ad-littered rehash of the real documentation. This occurs even in an anonymous Google session [0].

While the official docs are usually still first, they are increasingly getting overshadowed by these terrible results, particularly in the Google featured snippet [1]. Both ddg and bing seem to suffer from the same problem.

Is the pagerank of these sites legitimate, or the result of some new SEO tactic? Is this phenomenon actually as recent as it seems? Is there a centralized list of such websites somewhere that I can blacklist?

[0] https://i.imgur.com/U0CKhrf.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/TyWoKgS.png