French is my mother tongue, but I've quickly learned during my studies that using English keywords in my STEM-related searches would simply lead me to better (and more abundant) results.

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.

I don't have an example search, although I'll try to remember to update this comment the next time it happens. On average I come across these things at least once a day, but it depends what I'm working on. It tends to be when searching for more obscure bugs, for which there is a GitHub issue but it's not ranked highly on Google for whatever reason, but these spam sites are ranked highly.

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.