If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
Interesting to see reddit on the block list, I have issues with the way they’ve been operating but I do often find myself explicitly adding site:reddit.com to google searches, since it seems like one of few places online where there is still non-sponsored conversation about diverse topics. RIP old-school forums.
I'm doing the same thing, but specifically for reviews/recommendations. I can't remember the last time I had even an inkling of trust for a review published on a website. Reddit is basically the only source I have for potentially trustworthy opinions about products
IMO, this is no longer the case. Basically any new thread is getting astroturfed by marketing teams, and it seems like Reddit started doing SEO to promote newer threads, so the days of reliable reddit reviews seem to be over
Subreddits that are about buying things (/r/buyitforlife, /r/frugalmalefashion) are done. Same with any askreddit thread that's like "What's a product for under $x that changed your life" or something like that.
I still find /r/cooking gives good recommendations, despite the fact that the world of recipes is filled with spam and low quality content. Maybe the unit economics of astroturfing just don't work out for it.
Definitely true. Marketing teams at multiple roles paid third parties to advertise on Reddit. Even tongue in cheek comments about incidents are marketing.
If you're not logged in to Reddit (and Facebook, etc), you often don't get the content that shows in the snippet of the SERP. Google don't always have a cached page now.
Oh man I blocked all these when I first started using it and haven't even thought of it since. Now I realise how much Pinterest and W3Schools not showing up has improved my life!
I've generally really loved w3schools for their tutorials -- I've been using them to teach my kids web programming and whatnot recently and generally been happy with them. Is there something I'm missing about it? Maybe it's because we have really good ad-blockers running, but their content seems fine and (generally?) not terribly "lifted" from other sites (I.E., just SEO spam).
Is there a replacement for them that fills the same gap for web reference / tutorials?
They have. It's a lot better now than when they started out. They have incrementally been improving it. The reason why it gets pushed down is because a lot of people have a natural distate for the ads and the fact that it's a content farm. But if you have good ad blocking I don't see the harm in using it as long as you understand what it is.
They went from being bad compared to everything else to now feeling good compared to everything else.
Basically they stayed static and the rest of the internet worsened around them and our perspectives are now skewed.
What used to feel like a spammy content farm is actually not that bad now that we have seen real spammy content farms, like the SO clones that just take SO posts, rip out important css elements so it is harder to read, and slap as many ads as the ad networks allow them around it and then throw up exit intent banners and crypto-mining javascript.
Now just a normal content farm feels like a breath of fresh air when we deal with those garbage sites as alternatives.
Way back when they first started, they used to have content that was outright blatantly wrong and dangerous if followed. It's definitely much better in that respect now.
This is correct. They haven't been treading water. They have consciously tried hard to edit out the flagrantly incorrect content that used to be on the site.
I agree with you about w3schools; they've improved a lot since they first started out, and cleaned up a lot of problems. I think it's just fine to use for that purpose. A lot of technologists look down their noses at w3schools and vilify them just because they consider it a content farm.
In theory it does, but pretty much nobody uses it in this manner except for W3C, so that is the association for most people who recognize it in the first place.
I'm ... surprised and have mixed emotions that though msn.com is listed, no Yahoo domains make any of the blocked / raised / lowered / pinned lists. I'm reading that as a sign of total irrelevance.
