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by Lunrtick 1828 days ago
My occasional accidental Google search for programming related things has been filled with spammy sites - I wouldn't quite describe them as "no content", but there really wasn't much of it. DDG isn't really better, but I definitely wouldn't say it's worse, at least for my searches.
2 comments

To clarify-- I didnt mean low quality, just zero quality.

so if I searched for "How to move my email list to Aweber" I would get a page that was a copy paste of the Aweber home page, with my search term randomly sprinkled in.

And it wasnt just 1-2 sites. Sometimes, the top 3-4 would be spam, and even Aweber's own help page would be pushed down.

Seemed to me someone was doing some sort of dynamic search stuffing which was fooling DDG, but not Google. But the dark SEO was so obvious, I'm surprised DDG (or Bing or whoever they get their results from) fell for it.

I've gotten that exact thing on Google but for some stack overflow questions or articles. However, they were usually pretty far down the list, though still on the first page.
Hmm. For your test query, both provide similar results (mostly links to blog.aweber.com), though Google has a higher percentage of third party YouTube videos.
I’m often amazed how many Wikipedia ripoffs can get such high rankings on Google.