It completely boggles my mind that the useless GitHub and SO clones rank first page on Google. Do engineers at Google not use their own product?
If I am right they played stupid games and won stupid prizes. More specifically they have allowed rampant deletionism for years so while I am fairly certain the questions and answers originated on Stack Overflow it wouldn't surprise me if a good number of of those aren't visible on Stack Overflow anymore which would explain why they rank higher in Google.
Done right this would actually be a service.
Sadly some of them seems to mix together various questions and answers in the same page to generate text matches for unusual queries.
Do you have an example search leading to a GitHub clone?
A few weeks/months ago however, while I was trying to solve an issue whith a colleague who would search using french keywords, I noticed that some websites featured on the first page of the Google results were off.
In short, they were machine-translated versions of Stack Overflow threads. And they would appear in most of the searches using french keywords.
Those websites also appeared rarely in my searches while I was using English keywords, but most of the time I never bothered opening them. But now I notice them every time.
Some examples: When searching for "wget set http proxy" on Google, the fourth result leads me to qastack.fr, and the ninth to it-swarm-fr.com, both are websites featuring scrapped and machine-translated threads from Stack Overflow.
When searching deliberately in french for "Eclipse CDT stdout ne s'affiche pas" ("Eclipse CDT stdout not displayed [in console]"), the first result leads me to askcodez.com and the fourth one to qastack.fr (askodez is the same as the other two).
I have never stumbled upon Github clones, yet, however.
GitMemory is probably the most well-known example; it's just a thin layer over the GitHub API with a completely garbage UI, yet it often ranks higher than GitHub itself.
