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by commandlinefan 1618 days ago
> They are your typical run-of-the-mill tutorials that replicate what's written on the official framework/language guide

Yep, I'd like to permanently blacklist those idiotic baeldung, w3schools, tutorialspoint, and geeksforgeeks blogspam entries that SEO'ed themselves to the top of every google search I do for anything programming related.

7 comments

I've found baeldung to be quite helpful actually. What do you not like about it? I understand what you mean though, I don't like the garbage programming-related articles from a lot of these sites you've listed. Even I as a newb developer have seen very poor advice or wrong info on w3schools, for example.
w3schools has come a long way since the days of w3fools. What incorrect info. do you see on w3schools currently ? I find it to be a decent source these days.
> I've found baeldung to be quite helpful actually. What do you not like about it?

It's probably great when you're looking to fill some gaps but not when you're starting fresh and trying to wrap your head around some things. Many a times I've found the examples incomplete in the sense that yes, they work (usually) but just show me how, not why. Or maybe it's just the nature of the beast that Spring is. I've given up on Baeldung, I skip it when googling Java related stuff. But that's just my experience.

There's an extension for Chrome and Firefox called "uBlacklist" that lets you do exactly this - you can maintain a list of domains that you never want to appear in the results of Google searches that you do.
Thank you for this. I’m replying so it’ll be easy for me to find your post tomorrow when I’ll need to remember the name of this.
Omg this is amazing. Now I can blacklist those "hotexamples" websites
You don’t need an extension. You can just use the `-site` operator, and put your list in a bookmarklet, or use your browser’s ability to define search shortcuts, if it has that.
Until Google starts ignoring that operator. Or the next blogspam SEO site pops up that's not on your -site list.
Is there such a thing for Firefox?
Baeldung I've found to be fantastic for Java tricks and Java library usage. Geeksforgeeks blogspam really helped me with algorithm problems while preparing for Leetcode-style interviews.

I'd agree though that w3schools and tutorialspoint do as much harm as good.

Try the userscript "Google Hit Hider by Domain (Search Filter / Block Sites)" by Jefferson Scher, whom you may know as one of the top support specialist at Mozilla: http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

"GHHbD" is a precursor to uBlacklist; and was THE replacement to blocking sites on Google Search after Google removed the built-in function, many years ago.

The disadvantage of GHHbD is that it doesn't handled regex filtering. However one of its many advantages is that it does block TLDs: https://greasyfork.org/en/forum/discussion/comment/55821/#Co...

But sometimes official documentation can be cryptic like man pages and some Python documentation. Those g4gs and others usually have easy to understand examples and some extra explanation you don't in get official documentation.
Whats funny is they have SEO'd their way to the top and once you are accustomed to it and scroll past them you are also scrolling past the top (or maybe all) the ads on the right hand side of search results.
Everyone should be using uBlock Origin anyways. I don't remember the last time I saw search ads, or any online ads for that matter.
W3Schools, TutorialsPoint and GeeksForGeeks tend to be low quality and have better alternatives, but I do quite like Baeldung's Java articles.