cnr.it is a domain which belongs to the Italian Research Council, and that subdomain seems to be a blog by the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems.

These are not scammers, it's probably an amateur researcher which published that information in a blog which is usually read by no-one. Probably it wasn't even meant to be public. But because of the prestige of the domain, it becomes first in relevant searches.

If you track down the author and send him a quick mail, I'm 100% sure they'll help.

I've worked at CNR.

Correct, it looks more like a page containing useful info for their users/students etc

There are plenty of scam pages, but specifically this one doesn't look like it

> it's probably an amateur researcher which published that information in a blog which is usually read by no-one.

Ah, but this is the new method of SEO trickery and credential scamming. Publishing a 'guest post' on a high-ranking blog subdomain of a trusted instititution. There was a story of someone doing this on Harvard University's blogs, which I can't find right now.

But I found something even better. An actual UpWork posting promising to publish your crap on Chapman.edu's university blog:

https://www.upwork.com/services/product/5-high-da-dofollow-g...

Still, it appears someone at CNR copy-pasted someone else's blog and published it as their own.

No, the very first thing in the blog post is a link to the original, so it’s highly unlikely they wanted to pretend to be the author.

More like someone who didn’t care much about copyright or license decided to back up information they found useful in their personal blog.

Honestly, a researcher should know better to not plagiarize or to give attribution better than that. This is core in their job. If they do exactly this in their papers, it's going to be bad for them and they know it.

It's good they linked to the original post and that the link is the first thing we see, but nothing says that it's the source, and no paragraph explains that the content comes from elsewhere.

I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.

I see no malicious intents, it's probably done in good faith, but meh.

To the author: did you try to reach out? I'm sure something can be done about it if it bothers you. I expect the author of this copy to be receptive.

> I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.

Quite possibly an easy way to preserve the content in case the original goes offline and to share it with colleagues. Perhaps they wanted to link to it from some long-lived or even printed material. Not saying it’s the best way to do so, but it’s plausible and not malicious.

It’s plausible and not malicious, understandable too, but it's not hard to say it in a sentence at the beginning of the post.

This is a public blog, not some internal website.

Anyway, my previous comment probably sounds harsh because it is the way I wrote it (because I previously worked in a research lab, so I kinda feel disappointed), but I still consider this a minor fuck up and it happens to everyone, for sure.

That's utterly illegal though

Maybe the bootleg page could be a source of inspiration?

It has a garbage/content ratio of 32 (the browser downloads 32 bytes for every byte of content) while the original page has a 400 ratio (the browser downloads 400 bytes for every byte of content). It's borderline denial of service attack against the visitor.

The original also has a slow aggressive cookie box that is unnecessary as visitors can be spied on using server logs, no need to have cookies for the spy infrastructure. The bootleg has no cookie box (though does set a couple of gratuitous cookies, and does load one gratuitous googleanalytics.js, so maybe it does the right thing in a non-compliant way).

Maybe all these factor make the original page look "less good" to google quality ranking? (which would be ironic given Google's general leadership of the Orgy of Waste school of web design.) Also if google starts ranking such pages up they may expose themselves to class action lawsuits as users could ask for a refund for the power, hardware and telecom bills incurred in being lead to load them?

> Also if google starts ranking such pages up they may expose themselves to class action lawsuits as users could ask for a refund for the power, hardware and telecom bills incurred in being lead to load them?

Sorry, but this is completely insane. Search engines should most certainly and definitely not ever be liable for linking to original sources for such a stupid reason. This American pro-litigious attitude has to stop.

Sure, it's tongue in cheek, but there is a tragedy of the commons in there: whatever massive waste devs and their employers inflict on society goes unpunished because there is no incentive to change that behaviour. Was suggesting some activist subvert computer misuse laws to fix this. Primary legislation or big tech using its weight would do as well.

In the physical world one can't dump a rusty aircraft carrier on someone else's lawn and get away with it. Should be the same in tech.

> In the physical world one can't dump a rusty aircraft carrier on someone else's lawn and get away with it. Should be the same in tech.

Google's search results are most definitely not your lawn, nor are heavy websites very much alike to rusty aircraft carriers. Or however this analogy is supposed to work anyway.

Americans aren't the ones forcing crazy things on internet companies these days.

No, they are the ones allowing companies become such behemoths that other sovereign governments have to step in and rule over to keep some kind of data privacy for their citizens.

You had a great argument until the last sentence

To be fair, even though littered with ads the bootleg is indeed more pleasant. Bootleg the bootlegger.

I count one advert on the original, and the page loaded instantly for me on my 10 year old laptop. What am I missing?

I agree. The bootlegged version is more inviting to read.

Plus, the original has an excessive amount of ads. I'm not surprised Google is ranking the other page higher.

> Orgy of Waste school of web design

What is this referring to?

Crappy angular apps

My Google experience would be improved immeasurably if there was a way for me to block domains after I decide I never want to see them in my search results again.

Another poster has already suggested `uBlacklist` so I won't waste bandwidth by repeating the link, but I want to underline the utility of this extension, because it's transformed my experience of using Google search for code problems.

Before using this, I was finding the first page of my search results were overwhelmed with StackOverflow-scrapers, which returned SO answers reformatted into some sort of garbage and unreadable 'blog-post'.

Nowadays, after blocking twenty/thirty/fifty(?) of these sites, I get to where I want as fast as I did 10 years ago.

Could you share the url list?

There's a public ruleset for this: https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-translatio...

Nice!

If anyone want to share other such lists, however subjective, I would be grateful

edit: found another one, https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation

Also you can use this for uBlock https://letsblock.it

What's the difference from letblockit to ublacklist? Is letblockit affiliated to ublock origin in some way?

Don't think they are affiliated, it's just something that I mainly use as a companion for uBlock to help me quickly generate filters etc.

You can also use it to block paywalled and clickbait content. For example, you can safely ignore anything from cnet.com or digitaltrends.com. There's a few niche-specific sites in my blocklist.

Searching for Python API docs and getting w3schools and geeksforgeeks results is frustrating. Is there a solution to this problem? Maybe even a browser extension?

If you are searching for docs, then https://devdocs.io/ might be better than a regular search engine.

That one's easy if you use duckduckgo.

!py urlunsplit

redirects you to:

https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=urlunsplit

Letting you blacklist a site is one thing. They could improve upon it by letting people downvote/upvote pages and then using their extensive information vault to decide who is somewhat reputable or just similar to you.

I mean, I am 40 years old programmer/entrepreneur interested in sports and traditional board and card games. I like nice restaurants and hotels and even sometimes write Google reviews on them. I have my Gmail account since the beginning and I am paying YouTube and Google services customer. I am using Google phones since the Nexus. Google knows who I am, what I like, where I visit. It's pretty good at estimating revenue of my company. What about using the info for something useful for once and just show me pages people like me liked and don't show me pages people like me think are spam/scam? Please?

That may sound promising on paper, but I give it at most 6 months before an up/downvote manipulation SEO industry emerges and starts destroying any burgeoning improvements in the quality of search results.

Not to mention anything even slightly political or divisive in nature will quickly become chaos.

That looks great, thanks. Installing it now!

I've been burned in the past by relying on extensions like these, which only work until Google change their HTML and then the extension author is (understandably) burned out and doesn't update the extension, and eventually I just give up and uninstall it... I'd be a lot happier if this was a core Google Search feature. But I understand that Google don't make money by blocking their (paying) customers (spammers who run ads) from their search results.

Google used to have this feature. Why did they remove it?

Because it was gamed.

Then they should have simply ignored the signal, not canned the feature

Of course, not the same but the Google News thing on Android lets you say you're not interested in this suggestion or don't show me this news source again.

You mean allow people to block Google properties in search? No way I guess.

The traditional response when someone hotlinks your images is to goatse them.

This would be lame, here I'm sure the person who reposted this content is not malicious. A quick mail is nicer and less work.

Sure, goatse people if they refuse to observe your requests if you feel like it.

FWIF, I get the original page as the first search result (and [0] as a “featured snippet” above it), and the crn.it page only as the third.

[0] https://opensource.com/article/18/7/how-check-free-disk-spac...

I'm seeing your page above the "spam/scam" page.

  #2 cyberciti.biz
  #3 cnr.it

DMCA notices are unpopular with the crowd here, but when your content is plagiarized and other people are profiting off of your work, I'd recommend the following workflow:

* Use Copyscape and perform automated plagiarized content detection.

* Automate the sending of DMCA notices to Google and the website host (using captcha solving services, if necessary).

Yeah no, automated DMCA notices should never be a thing. The shoot first ask questions later mechanic of DMCA notices is bad enough but at least have the decency to verify the claims you are making.

As lame as it is, it's not really plagiarism when there is attribution, even if it is non obviously that URL at the top of the page.

Attribution does not exempt an author from the need to get permission. Baring a few edge cases, such as fair use, a copying without permission is still a copyright violation, attribution or not.

Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement.

"Plagiarism" is not a legal thing: it's not a crime codified in law and doesn't appear in laws [1]. Instead, usually it's a violation of some internal code, e.g. a school's or newspaper's policy of integrity. As you say indeed, usually these policies only consider something plagiarism if there is a lack of (clear) attribution.

However copyright is encoded in law and copyright infringement is a crime. The linked page clearly violates the copyright of OP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects