7 ms·

Stack Overflow hit 1,000,000 questions last night

95 points by bjonathan 16y ago

retube 16y ago
Ah dammit. I noticed a couple of days ago the number of questions was at 997k. I meant to keep an eye out and see if I could ping in number 1 million - but then promptly forgot.
robgough 16y ago
This is great news, if for no other reason that prowling google for answers is 100%[1] more effective than it used to be, as most searches lead me straight to stackoverflow. [1] well, 100%-ish. I've not measured this. Nor am I going to.
- cdr 16y ago
  I haven't noticed too much change in Google; I generally just go straight to Stackoverflow first.
- markkanof 16y ago
  There seem to be a number of sites that just poorly mirror content from StackOverflow. They usually have the question and then maybe some answers, but don't usually include comments to answers or even which answer was marked as correct. It's very frustrating when they come up above StackOverflow in Google searches. I end up slowing down a lot to make sure I don't click on those results. Sure I could just go straight to StackOverflow which I often do, but there are other good sources of programming knowledge on the internet that I want to be able to find too. These mirror sites are also frustrating because they are blatantly leaching off of the work of both the StackOverflow developers and the StackOverflow community. Kind of makes me wish Google did have a blacklist for these cases.
  - spolsky 16y ago
    When we find out about these cases, we ask them to conform to our creative commons license agreement by linking back to stackoverflow.com, in hopes that ultimately this will teach Google that they are non-canonical and rank them lower than us.
    - brc 16y ago
      That might be so, but right now there's about three of them and they clog up the search results with essentially the same answer but lower quality for the reasons mentioned above. So far I've not seen any that outrank stackoverflow, but it's only a matter of time before one does some blackhat and jumps for certain questions. You say that they link back, but in the cases I've seen, they link back with a slightly different Url form to the one you use. For example : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-trace-with-line-numbers-from-user-bug-report-in-net http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-tr... this question appears on scraping sites (not going to name them for fear of feeding them traffic), but they link back with this Url: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925 - which doesn't resolve back to the longer version. I know there's a canonical link on it (for the longer url) but I'm wondering if this strategy is working or not. Maybe it's time to start rejecting some bots crawling the site, or at least to slow them right down. It's a problem for Google and for SO, so someone from both places should probably be talking about it. Because in the end, SO starts looking spammy because the others are spammy and scrape the content, which is exactly the opposite case of how things should be. The spam sites are just cloning SO and shoving crappy ads everywhere, it's not high quality content. When you ask a question, you want 5 different answers from 5 different site, not the same answer spammed 5 times back at you.
dnos 16y ago
Wow, that truly is amazing. On a funny note: I wonder how many of those questions were answerable by the first result of a simple google search? :P
- codeslush 16y ago
  My experience tells me that they usually are the first search result in google -- and when they aren't, I specifically look for them in the search results because the site is incredibly accurate and useful and I have come to trust it.
  - DrJokepu 16y ago
    Just as a side note, please make sure to upvote both the question and any helpful answers if you've found the question using Google and it helped you as that's how Stackoverflow dynamics work.
    - walkon 16y ago
      It seems like very few people understand that it doesn't cost anything to upvote other answers and especially questions. Lots of good questions get around 0-2 votes, but clearly draw significant activity and interest otherwise. Are people afraid of point inflation?
      - michaelbuckbee 16y ago
        On the StackOverflow podcast they had talked about some of the issues faced with awarding points for asking questions. Apparently many people feel that asking a good question isn't worthy of points (or as many points) as answering a question. They at one point (IIRC) were awarding points for asking a question, but that led to people spamming in low quality questions. My personal rule is that if the question was interesting enough to make me read it, it should probably be upvoted.
        EliAndrewC 16y ago
ankimal 16y ago
I m mostly always doing 'site:www.stackoverflow.com how do I do XYZ ?' in google ..
- rayvega 16y ago
  To conveniently search all of their stackexchange sites using Google including stackoverflow.com, try the search box on http://stackexchange.com/ http://stackexchange.com/. This somewhat helps with a problem they are facing which is fragmentation of questions and answers across their sites. For example, for Ubuntu you might need to search three or four of their sites before finding an answer to an issue you are having.
- mhp 16y ago
  Weird... it used to be on duckduckgo that if a Stack Overflow result was your first result, the answer would actually be displayed as well, but that doesn't seem to be working right now: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Netbeans+Forwarded+over+X11+Font http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Netbeans+Forwarded+over+X11+Font
- mahmud 16y ago
  you can drop the "www." prefix, btw.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Duck Duck Go makes this a bit easier, just say !so xyz.
  - eneveu 16y ago
    Even faster, I've setup "keyword searches" in Firefox (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches). I created the following bookmark: Name : [so] Search StackOverflow // the "[so]" here is just a mnemonic Location : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s Keyword : so Then, when I want to search for "vim vs emacs" on SO, I open a new tab (Ctrl + T), type "so vim vs emacs", and press enter. This searches "site:stackoverflow.com vim vs emacs" on Google. I have a similar smart bookmarks setup for HN searches, and you could get more creative if you want (DuckDuckGo search, or even a custom StackExchange search like rayvega mentioned, using "http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s in the location field). Chrome has something similar: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95653 http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38...
alanl 16y ago
My default google query for a programming problem has become. [keywords] site:stackoverflow.com And with 1M Q/A it looks like this isn't going to change any time soon!
joshhart 16y ago
I actually have trouble contributing to StackOverflow as much as I'd like. The community has gotten so good that most questions with my realm (Scala & Java) seem to be answered within 30 minutes. Since I only look for questions to answer a few times a week, I never find anything. At least I can get points by asking good questions.
jcnnghm 16y ago
Stack Overflow is the ultimate long-tail resource. My favorite example of this is, what I consider to be, a very obscure question I asked then answered about getting (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded-over-x11-font-problem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded...) anti-aliased fonts and sub-pixel rendering working when running java software on a remote X11 server. This sort of thing is incredibly esoteric, yet, close to 1,000 people have looked at it in the last year. When I asked the question, and found the answer, there was no useful information that I could find about it, yet when you search on google today for 'x11 java anti-alias' the first result is my question, and the second is someone elses. We've come a long way since expertsexchange.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  And now that question would get closed and marked "Belongs on ServerFault" before anyone could answer it.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Wouldn't it just get moved to ServerFault, and then someone would have answered it, and the Google result would have pointed at ServerFault instead?
    - blasdel 16y ago
      No, unfortunately it wouldn't. The google juice is completely concentrated on the stackoverflow domain — I constantly find insta-moved SO questions at the top of the search results, with the moved question on SF or SU nowhere to be found. Yet another defect of their asinine community silo policy. They don't do a 301 redirect — how would google know where the real question is?
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        Ah, gotcha. I was real into SO for the first week, and then stopped contributing. I didn't realize that was what would happen...
Sukotto 16y ago
While it's cool they've had a million questions, I feel more interested in seeing stats on things like: # non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non) # questions with an accepted answer # questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not
- RossM 16y ago
  This could be done using their data dumps (however I don't have access to SQL Server so I couldn't tell you this).
  - digitallogic 16y ago
    The data dumps are in an xml format, you don't need SQL Server to work with the data.
- spolsky 16y ago
  Just go here and type in your SQL query: http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new
  - Sukotto 16y ago
    Thank you very much for making this data available Joel. This is really interesting stuff.
- nopal 16y ago
  I think these are right. # non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non) - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12626/ http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12626/ # questions with an accepted answer - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12627/ http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12627/ # questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not - Don't know enough about their schema to answer this one. This could be the answer - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12635/ http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12635/
jacoblyles 16y ago
Congrats and thank you for making the web a better place!
mike463 16y ago
Bet they'd have more questions and answers without that stupid third-party login crap. (OpenID)
blasdel 16y ago
How many of those are duplicates of existing questions — doesn't heralding growth contradict the original site goal of wiki-edited QA that stays fresh forever?

95 points by bjonathan 16y ago

Ah dammit. I noticed a couple of days ago the number of questions was at 997k. I meant to keep an eye out and see if I could ping in number 1 million - but then promptly forgot.

robgough 16y ago

This is great news, if for no other reason that prowling google for answers is 100%[1] more effective than it used to be, as most searches lead me straight to stackoverflow. [1] well, 100%-ish. I've not measured this. Nor am I going to.

cdr 16y ago
I haven't noticed too much change in Google; I generally just go straight to Stackoverflow first.
markkanof 16y ago
There seem to be a number of sites that just poorly mirror content from StackOverflow. They usually have the question and then maybe some answers, but don't usually include comments to answers or even which answer was marked as correct. It's very frustrating when they come up above StackOverflow in Google searches. I end up slowing down a lot to make sure I don't click on those results. Sure I could just go straight to StackOverflow which I often do, but there are other good sources of programming knowledge on the internet that I want to be able to find too. These mirror sites are also frustrating because they are blatantly leaching off of the work of both the StackOverflow developers and the StackOverflow community. Kind of makes me wish Google did have a blacklist for these cases.
- spolsky 16y ago
  When we find out about these cases, we ask them to conform to our creative commons license agreement by linking back to stackoverflow.com, in hopes that ultimately this will teach Google that they are non-canonical and rank them lower than us.
  - brc 16y ago
    That might be so, but right now there's about three of them and they clog up the search results with essentially the same answer but lower quality for the reasons mentioned above. So far I've not seen any that outrank stackoverflow, but it's only a matter of time before one does some blackhat and jumps for certain questions. You say that they link back, but in the cases I've seen, they link back with a slightly different Url form to the one you use. For example : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-trace-with-line-numbers-from-user-bug-report-in-net http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-tr... this question appears on scraping sites (not going to name them for fear of feeding them traffic), but they link back with this Url: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925 - which doesn't resolve back to the longer version. I know there's a canonical link on it (for the longer url) but I'm wondering if this strategy is working or not. Maybe it's time to start rejecting some bots crawling the site, or at least to slow them right down. It's a problem for Google and for SO, so someone from both places should probably be talking about it. Because in the end, SO starts looking spammy because the others are spammy and scrape the content, which is exactly the opposite case of how things should be. The spam sites are just cloning SO and shoving crappy ads everywhere, it's not high quality content. When you ask a question, you want 5 different answers from 5 different site, not the same answer spammed 5 times back at you.

dnos 16y ago

Wow, that truly is amazing. On a funny note: I wonder how many of those questions were answerable by the first result of a simple google search? :P

codeslush 16y ago
My experience tells me that they usually are the first search result in google -- and when they aren't, I specifically look for them in the search results because the site is incredibly accurate and useful and I have come to trust it.
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  Just as a side note, please make sure to upvote both the question and any helpful answers if you've found the question using Google and it helped you as that's how Stackoverflow dynamics work.
  - walkon 16y ago
    It seems like very few people understand that it doesn't cost anything to upvote other answers and especially questions. Lots of good questions get around 0-2 votes, but clearly draw significant activity and interest otherwise. Are people afraid of point inflation?
    - michaelbuckbee 16y ago
      On the StackOverflow podcast they had talked about some of the issues faced with awarding points for asking questions. Apparently many people feel that asking a good question isn't worthy of points (or as many points) as answering a question. They at one point (IIRC) were awarding points for asking a question, but that led to people spamming in low quality questions. My personal rule is that if the question was interesting enough to make me read it, it should probably be upvoted.
      - EliAndrewC 16y ago

ankimal 16y ago

I m mostly always doing 'site:www.stackoverflow.com how do I do XYZ ?' in google ..

rayvega 16y ago
To conveniently search all of their stackexchange sites using Google including stackoverflow.com, try the search box on http://stackexchange.com/ http://stackexchange.com/. This somewhat helps with a problem they are facing which is fragmentation of questions and answers across their sites. For example, for Ubuntu you might need to search three or four of their sites before finding an answer to an issue you are having.
mhp 16y ago
Weird... it used to be on duckduckgo that if a Stack Overflow result was your first result, the answer would actually be displayed as well, but that doesn't seem to be working right now: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Netbeans+Forwarded+over+X11+Font http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Netbeans+Forwarded+over+X11+Font
mahmud 16y ago
you can drop the "www." prefix, btw.
cookiecaper 16y ago
Duck Duck Go makes this a bit easier, just say !so xyz.
- eneveu 16y ago
  Even faster, I've setup "keyword searches" in Firefox (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches). I created the following bookmark: Name : [so] Search StackOverflow // the "[so]" here is just a mnemonic Location : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s Keyword : so Then, when I want to search for "vim vs emacs" on SO, I open a new tab (Ctrl + T), type "so vim vs emacs", and press enter. This searches "site:stackoverflow.com vim vs emacs" on Google. I have a similar smart bookmarks setup for HN searches, and you could get more creative if you want (DuckDuckGo search, or even a custom StackExchange search like rayvega mentioned, using "http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s in the location field). Chrome has something similar: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95653 http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38...

alanl 16y ago

My default google query for a programming problem has become. [keywords] site:stackoverflow.com And with 1M Q/A it looks like this isn't going to change any time soon!

joshhart 16y ago

I actually have trouble contributing to StackOverflow as much as I'd like. The community has gotten so good that most questions with my realm (Scala & Java) seem to be answered within 30 minutes. Since I only look for questions to answer a few times a week, I never find anything. At least I can get points by asking good questions.

jcnnghm 16y ago

Stack Overflow is the ultimate long-tail resource. My favorite example of this is, what I consider to be, a very obscure question I asked then answered about getting (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded-over-x11-font-problem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded...) anti-aliased fonts and sub-pixel rendering working when running java software on a remote X11 server. This sort of thing is incredibly esoteric, yet, close to 1,000 people have looked at it in the last year. When I asked the question, and found the answer, there was no useful information that I could find about it, yet when you search on google today for 'x11 java anti-alias' the first result is my question, and the second is someone elses. We've come a long way since expertsexchange.

cookiecaper 16y ago
And now that question would get closed and marked "Belongs on ServerFault" before anyone could answer it.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Wouldn't it just get moved to ServerFault, and then someone would have answered it, and the Google result would have pointed at ServerFault instead?
  - blasdel 16y ago
    No, unfortunately it wouldn't. The google juice is completely concentrated on the stackoverflow domain — I constantly find insta-moved SO questions at the top of the search results, with the moved question on SF or SU nowhere to be found. Yet another defect of their asinine community silo policy. They don't do a 301 redirect — how would google know where the real question is?
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      Ah, gotcha. I was real into SO for the first week, and then stopped contributing. I didn't realize that was what would happen...

Sukotto 16y ago

While it's cool they've had a million questions, I feel more interested in seeing stats on things like: # non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non) # questions with an accepted answer # questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not

RossM 16y ago
This could be done using their data dumps (however I don't have access to SQL Server so I couldn't tell you this).
- digitallogic 16y ago
  The data dumps are in an xml format, you don't need SQL Server to work with the data.
spolsky 16y ago
Just go here and type in your SQL query: http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new
- Sukotto 16y ago
  Thank you very much for making this data available Joel. This is really interesting stuff.
nopal 16y ago
I think these are right. # non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non) - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12626/ http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12626/ # questions with an accepted answer - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12627/ http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12627/ # questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not - Don't know enough about their schema to answer this one. This could be the answer - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12635/ http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12635/

jacoblyles 16y ago

Congrats and thank you for making the web a better place!

mike463 16y ago

Bet they'd have more questions and answers without that stupid third-party login crap. (OpenID)

blasdel 16y ago

How many of those are duplicates of existing questions — doesn't heralding growth contradict the original site goal of wiki-edited QA that stays fresh forever?