Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
489 points (99.0% liked)
Programming
17326 readers
150 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.
Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.
WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder....
Hyphen (-) means you don't want to see this word, while words surrounded by quotes (") means you want these phrases exactly.
Most symbols are also ignored, which is great for an average user but terrible for programmers.
Yeh, suddenly you need to know what the language calls the operator within the context you want to use it.
At which point, you probably don't need to Google the symbol!
I'm still pissed over removing +words. Like, G+ is gone, guys, so revert that mess.
It was a really dumb move but you can can still get the same effect by putting a word in quotation marks.
UI-wise, though, it's toxic, and therefore slower and more stressing. It's something that can be fixed, and ergo essentially a bug. ;-)
Wait, what? On Google??
On Google and on Duck Duck Go too. On DDG you can't get rid of the over-optimized websites anymore even if you use -"website name". Luckily -site:address still works.
That's crazy. Google/DDG bloat from SEO websites had already driven me out a while ago, so I hadn't noticed. I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and I find I can trust my search results again. Being able to permanently downgrade or even block a given website is an awesome feature, I would recommend it just for that.
Wait WHAT? I was just asking on discord the other day if there existed a search engine that allowed you to blacklist websites as a user setting. I need to curate out all AI written garbage from my results.
Hmm, not really used to the idea of paying for search, but I understand.
Is it good at filtering AI generated sites and sites that are clearly copy pasted. Or do you kind of have to identify that yourself and manually block?
I think it's worth testing it with the free 100 searches. All you need is an email address (no credit card unless you're actually subscribing). I've only been using it a few days but I don't think it filters out AI generated sites. But you can set a ranking by site (block, lower, normal, raise, pin) so you can make stack overflow be priorised and block quora.
They have a ranking board of top sites in each category so you can go through it and set the rank of a bunch of sites upfront.
There's no specific AI detection at the moment, as far as I can tell. But it has "listicle" detection. If you ask "best lawn mower", all these "the 5 best lawn mowers of 2023" websites with affiliated Amazon links get pooled into a compact Listicle section, that you can just scroll past and ignore.