4 ms·

You can only scroll down if visiting from Google. Copying the URL and pasting it into your browser returns a page without the answer. I'm suprised Google didn't

by stusmith1977 17y ago

You can only scroll down if visiting from Google. Copying the URL and pasting it into your browser returns a page without the answer. I'm suprised Google didn't exclude them years ago. (Apologies if that's what you meant).

raganwald 17y ago
I didn't know this and I'm amazed. They've been receiving complaints about experts exchange for years. Why haven't they been tossed into the black hole? What motivates Google to allow sites like this to get the top hit on searches?
- patio11 17y ago
  Google will happily show garbage rather than showing nothing. (Welcome to the entire business model of some companies.) Experts Exchange plays right on the edge of what their policies allow, but previously they have backed off in response to feedback, and nixing them would cost Google millions of searches in a key influencer demographic getting nothing.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Thanks for the response. Perhaps I don't understand how search engines work: If I search for a programming term and EE is the top result, what do Google lose if they kill or seriously de-prioritize the EE link? Wouldn't Google just show me the rest of the links? It's not like EE pages are the only result for searches...
    - dangrossman 17y ago
      For lots of very specific error messages, they are the only page with an answer.
    - patio11 17y ago
      Yeah, but for the kind of searches EE is winning for, all or most of the rest of the links are garbage. Think like a junior developer for writing queries needed to write Big Freaking Enterprise backend software. For example, the first thing that popped into my head for a query likely to generate an EE result was [sort combobox java] -- it is something that you'll actually have to do for Big Freaking Enterprise development, it uses an "unsexy" programming language, and the phrasing is just off enough that people who know what they're talking about wouldn't phrase their pages that way. And sure enough, EE wins. See http://www.pastie.org/881242 http://www.pastie.org/881242 for the other results with my annotations.
      - raganwald 17y ago
        Interesting. Do they develop this organically or are they doing some keyword arbitrage-type stuff to include the keywords nobody else is hitting?
        piramida 17y ago
        No, but the sheer amount of junior developers who asked questions there over the last 10 years guaranteed that every possible way to incorrectly phrase a question is already answered. SO is - better open model, better interface, but lacks volume especially in some areas, and lacks trolling-question controls (i.e. "which language is better" type of million-answer threads). But it will mature, I find it interesting enough to contribute.
    - petercooper 17y ago
      EE pages are so annoying that people hit "Back" and think "what the hey, the real results are crap" before clicking on an ad. Without the EE pages, people would just think.. "ah, can't find an answer" and go away ;-)
  - jdavid 17y ago
    i always got more organic traffic to my site when i was using google adds on my blog.
  - andylei 17y ago
    wait, SE results > EE results > nothing. on EE, you can just scroll to the bottom to see the answers; what's the big deal?
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      Some dumbasses, such as myself, took a very long time to realize that EE answers are visible by scrolling to the bottom of the page.
- gojomo 17y ago
  The kind of 'cloaking' Google cares about is feeding the crawlers different data than what a Google searcher would get. The kind of cloaking ExpertsExchange is doing privileges Google's crawler and users, giving Google an advantage over competitors. What would motivate Google to punish such a site?
  - raganwald 17y ago
    If I search for a programming tip and find it through Google, I might bookmark it or use bit.ly to tweet it. If I have to scroll down past a bunch of garbage that is trying to fool me into paying for the tip, I am not going to bookmark it or share it. If I lose my mind and share it and I immediately get 500 emails telling me that when they go to the site they don't see the tip (because they didn't go through GOOG), I am goingto have a lot of egg on my face. If I do the same search in Bing and I get stack overflow, I'm a happy man. How often does that have to happen before I bail on using GOOG? I don't think of this as privileging Google users, I think of it as creating a nasty time bomb when users discover that they can't share or save their results.
    - gojomo 17y ago
      Those outcomes after bookmark/shorten/share are inconvenient. But are you more angry at ExEx or at Google? Most people in this thread have retaliated against ExEx, not Google. And, are these frustrating outcomes inconvenient enough for you to actually switch away from Google? Or to do other things that help Google? If instead you search again to access the answer or find an alternate source -- net win for Google! If you are driven to use Google Web History, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader, or Google Buzz to bookmark/shorten/share -- net win for Google! If initially including the 'time bomb' ExEx result, as decepulative as it was in the long run, prevented you from trying another service on your first search -- net win for Google! By advantaging the use of Google search (and services) over all other link-discovery mechanisms, ExEx is doing Google a small service. The same paradox applies with the legions of SEO-pablum and Made-For-AdSense sites. Google doesn't want them if they totally destroy the user experience, but if they marginally force a few more search refinements, and result in a few longer sessions viewing more Google AdWords/AdSense, the net economic incentives are for Google to tolerate them, and rationalize their existence. I wonder if in the domain where we pay the price with our attention, Google search is a little like a 'Giffen Good'. That is, a good whose consumption goes up as it becomes more costly -- because there are no easy substitutes, and it depletes our overall budget so much that other expenditures are crowded-out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
BrandonM 17y ago
http://userstyles.org/styles/17132 http://userstyles.org/styles/17132 You ever happened to urgently need a fast solution to a problem, search on Google, click a link - and again you were on a page of ExpertsExchange, exactly describing your problem - but not giving an answer? Instead they tell you, you would have found it here if you paid? Never again. Ads gone, solution shown :-)
alexitosrv 17y ago
Well, this is the official answer of why EE is not excluded. "Can Experts Exchange be excluded from search results?, May 19, 2009 It it possible to exclude Experts Exchange from search results?, Why are they ranked so high with such a spammy interface? Joshua Starr, IN Answer by Matt Cutts: ... We aren't going to remove Experts Exchange because they don't violate our quality guidelines or at least they currently don't and that they don't cloak. Some people think that they do cloak, but if you're going to look at the cache page... the content is there. So, it's not as if they're showing different content to Googlebot than they are to users... However if you use Search Wiki, you can remove Experts Exchange from individual queries..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9T6LNMvpvw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9T6LNMvpvw
- Kadin 17y ago
  Sadly Google seems to have dumped SearchWiki. I noticed last week that the "X" button (which removed a particular page from the resultset) is no longer there. You can only upvote, not downvote ... which is stupid. I used the "X"-to-remove far more (generally to remove spammy SEO garbage) than I used the upvote box. Unless it was being gamed by the SEO crowd, I can't understand why Google killed that feature ... it was the best thing they'd added to the core Web Search in a long time, and was a big step towards a sort of Customized Search which I've always thought could be Google's killer app. With all the information they have about accountholders, it would make sense to customize results depending on who's searching. For some reason they seem to be opposed to per-user customization of results, though.

raganwald 17y ago

I didn't know this and I'm amazed. They've been receiving complaints about experts exchange for years. Why haven't they been tossed into the black hole? What motivates Google to allow sites like this to get the top hit on searches?

patio11 17y ago
Google will happily show garbage rather than showing nothing. (Welcome to the entire business model of some companies.) Experts Exchange plays right on the edge of what their policies allow, but previously they have backed off in response to feedback, and nixing them would cost Google millions of searches in a key influencer demographic getting nothing.
- raganwald 17y ago
  Thanks for the response. Perhaps I don't understand how search engines work: If I search for a programming term and EE is the top result, what do Google lose if they kill or seriously de-prioritize the EE link? Wouldn't Google just show me the rest of the links? It's not like EE pages are the only result for searches...
  - dangrossman 17y ago
    For lots of very specific error messages, they are the only page with an answer.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Yeah, but for the kind of searches EE is winning for, all or most of the rest of the links are garbage. Think like a junior developer for writing queries needed to write Big Freaking Enterprise backend software. For example, the first thing that popped into my head for a query likely to generate an EE result was [sort combobox java] -- it is something that you'll actually have to do for Big Freaking Enterprise development, it uses an "unsexy" programming language, and the phrasing is just off enough that people who know what they're talking about wouldn't phrase their pages that way. And sure enough, EE wins. See http://www.pastie.org/881242 http://www.pastie.org/881242 for the other results with my annotations.
    - raganwald 17y ago
      Interesting. Do they develop this organically or are they doing some keyword arbitrage-type stuff to include the keywords nobody else is hitting?
      - piramida 17y ago
        No, but the sheer amount of junior developers who asked questions there over the last 10 years guaranteed that every possible way to incorrectly phrase a question is already answered. SO is - better open model, better interface, but lacks volume especially in some areas, and lacks trolling-question controls (i.e. "which language is better" type of million-answer threads). But it will mature, I find it interesting enough to contribute.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    EE pages are so annoying that people hit "Back" and think "what the hey, the real results are crap" before clicking on an ad. Without the EE pages, people would just think.. "ah, can't find an answer" and go away ;-)
- jdavid 17y ago
  i always got more organic traffic to my site when i was using google adds on my blog.
- andylei 17y ago
  wait, SE results > EE results > nothing. on EE, you can just scroll to the bottom to see the answers; what's the big deal?
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    Some dumbasses, such as myself, took a very long time to realize that EE answers are visible by scrolling to the bottom of the page.
gojomo 17y ago
The kind of 'cloaking' Google cares about is feeding the crawlers different data than what a Google searcher would get. The kind of cloaking ExpertsExchange is doing privileges Google's crawler and users, giving Google an advantage over competitors. What would motivate Google to punish such a site?
- raganwald 17y ago
  If I search for a programming tip and find it through Google, I might bookmark it or use bit.ly to tweet it. If I have to scroll down past a bunch of garbage that is trying to fool me into paying for the tip, I am not going to bookmark it or share it. If I lose my mind and share it and I immediately get 500 emails telling me that when they go to the site they don't see the tip (because they didn't go through GOOG), I am goingto have a lot of egg on my face. If I do the same search in Bing and I get stack overflow, I'm a happy man. How often does that have to happen before I bail on using GOOG? I don't think of this as privileging Google users, I think of it as creating a nasty time bomb when users discover that they can't share or save their results.
  - gojomo 17y ago
    Those outcomes after bookmark/shorten/share are inconvenient. But are you more angry at ExEx or at Google? Most people in this thread have retaliated against ExEx, not Google. And, are these frustrating outcomes inconvenient enough for you to actually switch away from Google? Or to do other things that help Google? If instead you search again to access the answer or find an alternate source -- net win for Google! If you are driven to use Google Web History, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader, or Google Buzz to bookmark/shorten/share -- net win for Google! If initially including the 'time bomb' ExEx result, as decepulative as it was in the long run, prevented you from trying another service on your first search -- net win for Google! By advantaging the use of Google search (and services) over all other link-discovery mechanisms, ExEx is doing Google a small service. The same paradox applies with the legions of SEO-pablum and Made-For-AdSense sites. Google doesn't want them if they totally destroy the user experience, but if they marginally force a few more search refinements, and result in a few longer sessions viewing more Google AdWords/AdSense, the net economic incentives are for Google to tolerate them, and rationalize their existence. I wonder if in the domain where we pay the price with our attention, Google search is a little like a 'Giffen Good'. That is, a good whose consumption goes up as it becomes more costly -- because there are no easy substitutes, and it depletes our overall budget so much that other expenditures are crowded-out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

BrandonM 17y ago

http://userstyles.org/styles/17132 http://userstyles.org/styles/17132 You ever happened to urgently need a fast solution to a problem, search on Google, click a link - and again you were on a page of ExpertsExchange, exactly describing your problem - but not giving an answer? Instead they tell you, you would have found it here if you paid? Never again. Ads gone, solution shown :-)

alexitosrv 17y ago

Well, this is the official answer of why EE is not excluded. "Can Experts Exchange be excluded from search results?, May 19, 2009 It it possible to exclude Experts Exchange from search results?, Why are they ranked so high with such a spammy interface? Joshua Starr, IN Answer by Matt Cutts: ... We aren't going to remove Experts Exchange because they don't violate our quality guidelines or at least they currently don't and that they don't cloak. Some people think that they do cloak, but if you're going to look at the cache page... the content is there. So, it's not as if they're showing different content to Googlebot than they are to users... However if you use Search Wiki, you can remove Experts Exchange from individual queries..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9T6LNMvpvw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9T6LNMvpvw

Kadin 17y ago
Sadly Google seems to have dumped SearchWiki. I noticed last week that the "X" button (which removed a particular page from the resultset) is no longer there. You can only upvote, not downvote ... which is stupid. I used the "X"-to-remove far more (generally to remove spammy SEO garbage) than I used the upvote box. Unless it was being gamed by the SEO crowd, I can't understand why Google killed that feature ... it was the best thing they'd added to the core Web Search in a long time, and was a big step towards a sort of Customized Search which I've always thought could be Google's killer app. With all the information they have about accountholders, it would make sense to customize results depending on who's searching. For some reason they seem to be opposed to per-user customization of results, though.