> "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 I guess because the content might be out of date?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.
For the Stackoverflow / Github clones, we partner with https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter and their lists are available as presets at the bottom of the filter configuration.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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??
https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
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-translatio...
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
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.
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
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!