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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

Github issue clones and StackOverflow clones pretty much dominate most of my programming related search results these days.

Unfortunately DDG isn't much better.

It takes a lot of effort to finesse a search query such that I can get a good result, like a link to documentation or a personal website where someone wrote something up (which is often more thoughtful than what Medium and Dev.to offer).

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At this point google is a shortcut to documentation. I look for the first link that looks like a readthedocs page. You could even short-circuit this and bookmark the documentation for the tool you want. It's going "backwards" in a sense but learning to read a manual well can be quicker than letting google think for you.

I have never seen a Github issue clone or StackOverflow clone in my life.

This surprises me because it's a major problem for me, particularly for GitHub. I end up doing this for clones that don't even link back to the orginal:

1. Search for something 2. See the cloned issue but no results for the original 3. Copy some unique-looking text from the clone 4. Search the repo directly for that text

It's awful. Seems to be a very recent problem? Maybe the last few months?

If I google "winforms change title bar color", I stackoverflow on top and on the first page:

https://newbedev.com/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-...

http://ostack.cn/?qa=707394/

But this blocks it:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackover...

uBlacklist [0] solves this. The filters in [1] let me block all those clone sites.

[0]: https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist

[1]: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

It might be a function of your programming niche, but is it possible that you just didn't realize you were looking at a clone? These sites are everywhere.

It's a portion of the content that's cloned: the question and subsequent answers or discussion. The styling is usually totally different, even the page structure is different, to the point that I don't realize I'm looking at a clone unless I recognize the copy from a specific github or stackoverflow page that I had looked at previously in my search session.

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