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This article is speculative at best, but I can't say my heart didn't skip a beat at the prospect of never seeing experts-exchange.com in my search results ever

This article is speculative at best, but I can't say my heart didn't skip a beat at the prospect of never seeing experts-exchange.com in my search results ever again.

Natsu 16y ago
Of course, this might just make the spammers buy up more domains ...
- Hoff 16y ago
  And then the GBL gets deployed by Spamhaus.
- DenisM 16y ago
  That's just fine, today many spammers are building up domain reputation to exploit, so if we force them out of their domains it will slow them down quite a bit.
- chrischen 16y ago
  Better than making them not buy up more domains.
w1ntermute 16y ago
This userscript can do the job in the meantime: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  And for chrome: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbckmoknagndlhjbeohb https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbck...
  - rwolf 16y ago
    Chrome users can also just use the userscript, thanks to Chrome's greasemonkey-devouring magics :)
MichaelGG 16y ago
I hate how experts-exchange does their pages, trying to pretend you need to sign up to see the content. They even had an ad on the side that said "Tired of scrolling? Sign up!". One would hope such misleading tactics would be penalized in search results... But on more than a few occasions, I've gotten some pretty high quality answers off their site.
- eli 16y ago
  If I recall correctly, it used to be the case that they only showed the answer to Googlebot and if you wanted it, you actually did have to pay (or perhaps forge your useragent)
  - grhino 16y ago
    I think Google added to their policy that if your site returned different content specifically to the Googlebot, it would have an impact on whether that site would appear in search results. Experts-exchange got around that by making the answer appear at the bottom of the page and required a lot of scrolling.
  - tesseract 16y ago
    It used to be the case that if you weren't Googlebot, you'd see some blurry scrambled text where the answer ought to be. The blurriness was created by superimposing a partially transparent image over the text, and the scrambled text was really the rot13'd answer, so it was possible to get the answer by grabbing the relevant chunk of html source and running it through a rot13 tool.
markkanof 16y ago
Even worse is some of the sites that have popped up duplicating content from stackoverflow. They often come up above the actual stackoverflow page for a given question and then don't even have the entire set of answers and comments that are present on the real site, or they just have a terrible layout that is hard to use. I dislike experts-exchange a lot, but at least they have original content and aren't just leaching off other sites.
jaspero 16y ago
Same here. I hate that every click I make ends up at experts-exchange. I didn't even know you could find your answer by scrolling to the bottom until I read someone mention it on Hacker News.
saurik 16y ago
Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to just ban them, I've totally gotten answers to questions from there before (at first using Google cache, until someone showed me the now-stupidly-obvious-in-retrospect scroll-down-to-the-bottom technique), so I know banning them from my listings will make my life slightly worse, and I can always ignore them. Which, I guess, is a mindset that I think generally makes this concept not terribly useful: you can always personally ignore some domains that suck. The real issue is how many places have duplicate content, or even stupidly "reblogged"/"syndicated" content, that show up when you search for something: the domains for that are often very search-specific.

This article is speculative at best, but I can't say my heart didn't skip a beat at the prospect of never seeing experts-exchange.com in my search results ever again.

Natsu 16y ago

Of course, this might just make the spammers buy up more domains ...

Hoff 16y ago
And then the GBL gets deployed by Spamhaus.
DenisM 16y ago
That's just fine, today many spammers are building up domain reputation to exploit, so if we force them out of their domains it will slow them down quite a bit.
chrischen 16y ago
Better than making them not buy up more domains.

w1ntermute 16y ago

This userscript can do the job in the meantime: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156

jamesbritt 16y ago
And for chrome: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbckmoknagndlhjbeohb https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbck...
- rwolf 16y ago
  Chrome users can also just use the userscript, thanks to Chrome's greasemonkey-devouring magics :)

MichaelGG 16y ago

I hate how experts-exchange does their pages, trying to pretend you need to sign up to see the content. They even had an ad on the side that said "Tired of scrolling? Sign up!". One would hope such misleading tactics would be penalized in search results... But on more than a few occasions, I've gotten some pretty high quality answers off their site.

eli 16y ago
If I recall correctly, it used to be the case that they only showed the answer to Googlebot and if you wanted it, you actually did have to pay (or perhaps forge your useragent)
- grhino 16y ago
  I think Google added to their policy that if your site returned different content specifically to the Googlebot, it would have an impact on whether that site would appear in search results. Experts-exchange got around that by making the answer appear at the bottom of the page and required a lot of scrolling.
- tesseract 16y ago
  It used to be the case that if you weren't Googlebot, you'd see some blurry scrambled text where the answer ought to be. The blurriness was created by superimposing a partially transparent image over the text, and the scrambled text was really the rot13'd answer, so it was possible to get the answer by grabbing the relevant chunk of html source and running it through a rot13 tool.

markkanof 16y ago

Even worse is some of the sites that have popped up duplicating content from stackoverflow. They often come up above the actual stackoverflow page for a given question and then don't even have the entire set of answers and comments that are present on the real site, or they just have a terrible layout that is hard to use. I dislike experts-exchange a lot, but at least they have original content and aren't just leaching off other sites.

jaspero 16y ago

Same here. I hate that every click I make ends up at experts-exchange. I didn't even know you could find your answer by scrolling to the bottom until I read someone mention it on Hacker News.

saurik 16y ago

Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to just ban them, I've totally gotten answers to questions from there before (at first using Google cache, until someone showed me the now-stupidly-obvious-in-retrospect scroll-down-to-the-bottom technique), so I know banning them from my listings will make my life slightly worse, and I can always ignore them. Which, I guess, is a mindset that I think generally makes this concept not terribly useful: you can always personally ignore some domains that suck. The real issue is how many places have duplicate content, or even stupidly "reblogged"/"syndicated" content, that show up when you search for something: the domains for that are often very search-specific.