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While testing AI tools on DuckDuckGo (DDG), I noticed that the scraper site 9to5Science.com is plagiarizing much of our content (along with other SE science sites). For example a DDG search on "mod distributive law" listed this 9to5 scraped page before our original page, i.e. 9to5 somehow got higher page rank than SE.

The scraped page does not appear to include any links to the original SE content, and does not include any author attribution for answers. Rather, they list only the SE name and avatar (but no SE link) of the question author (formatted so poorly that it makes it appear that the question author is also the author of the answers). So if you discover your answers attributed to someone else on random web pages then this might be the source.

I have reported this to the SE team (via the "contact us" form). Does anyone know any other ways to address this?

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for noticing this, reporting it to the SE team, and letting us know. The only other things to possibly consider & also do that I'm aware of are in the network Meta FAQ post A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What should I do?. $\endgroup$
    – John Omielan
    Commented Mar 15, 2023 at 22:16
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    $\begingroup$ @John Thanks for the link. From the answer there it appears unlikely that SE will take any action since the site does not appear to be be a proxy (e.g. view count is less so it appears to be serving some cached content vs. relaying requests to SE). $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Commented Mar 15, 2023 at 23:17
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    $\begingroup$ Have you posted on meta.stackexchange.com since it also involves plagiarism of other sites, like this from this. $\endgroup$
    – D S
    Commented Mar 16, 2023 at 10:19
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    $\begingroup$ now I see, almost every other question belongs to StackExchange. This is so infuriating! $\endgroup$
    – D S
    Commented Mar 16, 2023 at 10:24
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    $\begingroup$ Here is a clear example: The entry in 9to5science.com : 9to5science.com/… Here the entry in MathSE: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1834830/… Note that the name of the authors of the answers have been simply omitted in 9to5science.com $\endgroup$
    – Ramiro
    Commented Mar 19, 2023 at 2:52
  • $\begingroup$ This is no longer the top result for the search. Scraper sites like the plethora of Wikipedia scrapers which used to exist, come and go, and it is the search engine that decides where they rank the results. In the end this rubbishing site was demoted by the search engine anyway. I don't think it is worth anyone wasting any time on this issue at all. $\endgroup$
    – Suzu Hirose
    Commented Mar 23, 2023 at 1:10
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    $\begingroup$ @SuzuHirose Possibly the rank demotion was related to this post, i.e. someone may have reported the site to DDG. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Commented Mar 23, 2023 at 1:21

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It's been awhile since I last looked into this.

From the SE standpoint efforts basically came to the conclusion that this cannot be managed except by having copyright holders (the OP of Questions or Answers) issue a takedown notice. If one of your posts is involved, I can give you more details.

On the other hand the folks at Google are interested in knowing about cases where the scraper site gets ranked above or nearly so with the original content. I believe I included a Google reporting mechanism link in the earlier post. If you find it no longer works, let me know.

I looked for what Duck-Duck-Go (DDG) has in the way of parallel reporting. Their Help pages have nothing on "scraper sites" per se. For questions that are not thus answered, they refer to "ask the community" (which is a subreddit forum).

There I found among the frequently-asked-questions a note about how to report "Bad or Irrelevant Search Results":

Bad or Irrelevant Search Results

Q: I found an irrelevant or inappropriate search result. How do I report it to DuckDuckGo?

A: To report search result issues, use the Send feedback button shown on search results pages. We consider user feedback very carefully and use it to make decisions about product improvements.

Not as clear cut as the Google approach, but something I'd pursue if I found one of the scraper sites using my content without adhering to the CC-BY-SA terms of license and ranked higher in DDG results than StackExchange's original.

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