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Comment by RosanaAnaDana | Hacker News Reader

I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages.

What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues?

I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow.

Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.

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Python has been the worst for me; it's almost impossible to find the official documentation for modules/functions.

Defining search aliases or custom search engines in the browser with URLs like '''https://www.google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org+%s''' is probably the reasonable thing to do.

https://devdocs.io is nice when you're searching for official documentation.

Reminds me of Dash: https://kapeli.com/dash

Thanks for dropping that link. This thing looks fantastic

I have the same experience. I assume these websites are just content farms trying to give away free introductory training for Python programming. Later, they try to upsell you to buy training. I see the same when Googling common Git issues.

Ditto, moving from Scala to Python and Go for a stint shocked me with the craptacular state of search results for "easy/popular" languages. Next stop was an extension for blocking particular sites in search.

https://zealdocs.org

This has been a game changer for me. I got it for this very reason

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

It is especially bad when all of those "tutorial" websites are pay-walled Medium sites too

SO search results have also been broken for about 8 years unless you know how to filter for recent results. There is no good search on the internet anymore. I'm to the point where I wish I could !g2 bang DDG to go to the first result on the second page of search results.

This is sad and a recent development, i was using google to search for manuals/api docs as it was better than builtin indexing. But now-a-days official sites are never the first link.

100%.

Spurious garbage SEO programming sites showing unhelpful code snippets in particular have had a big productivity hit on my coding.

I wonder what the people working on those sites think about what they’re doing.

Making money from Ads?

Personally if I was making money at the expense of humanity’s ability to access knowledge, I wouldn’t feel so great about it.

Same boat here, the only reason I switch DDG to Google was to find more relevance on programming / CS issues. But I feel like it's getting worse.

GeeksForGeeks is the prime culprit and lotsa times what geeksforgeeks has is just the docs.

Agreed, the most vexing thing about this is that DDG is now promoting the exact same tutorial sites that Google is : Geekforgeeks, etc

What's the point in having different search engines if they copy each other's search results?

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