
Ask HN: What happened to Google's programming-related search results? - czr
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&#x2F;c2 article.<p>However, as of late (~past 6 months), 30-50% of the results are w3schools-esque sites like &quot;tutorialspoint.com&quot;, &quot;thegeekdiary.com&quot;, &quot;cyberciti.biz&quot;, &quot;geeksforgeeks.org&quot;, &quot;thegeekstuff.com&quot;, &quot;appdividend.com&quot;... all providing some ugly, ad-littered rehash of the real documentation. This occurs even in an anonymous Google session [0].<p>While the official docs are <i>usually</i> 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.<p>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?<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;U0CKhrf.png
[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;TyWoKgS.png
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Nextgrid
> ad-littered rehash of the real documentation

It could very well be that ad-contaminated content is preferred because it's
what pays Google's bills.

