5 ms·

So HN, what sites are we all blocking?

jonknee 16y ago
My first round includes eHow, Mahalo, Associated Content, Experts Exchange, Squidoo and Examiner. Update: I added answers.yahoo.com as well, which has consistently terrible content and yet is often highly ranked.
- klbarry 16y ago
  I really often get exactly the answer I need from Yahoo Answers, just to throw that in there...
  - jonknee 16y ago
    I have only ever seen incorrect answers on Yahoo Answers, so our experiences definitely vary. That's the beauty of allowing custom blocklists though.
  - pamelafox 16y ago
    I've found that there are some more taboo (but valid) questions that are only ever answered on Yahoo! Answers, presumably because people aren't worried about their identity there. For an extreme example: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071113122412AAHwZQD http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071113122412AA... (Warning: Taboo. And the answer probably isn't relevant to 95% of the posters here. :)
    - jonknee 16y ago
      I found Wikipedia's answer to be of much higher quality (and properly cited).
- MichaelGG 16y ago
  Experts Exchange used to be a scam, showing fake results. But now, they just roll them to the bottom of the page. I don't endorse them or like them, but they've had decent quality answers several times.
  - jonknee 16y ago
    They play too many dirty tricks for my tastes (for example, it's only at the bottom of the page when you come from Google)--I won't give them any of my page views. I have no idea why Google doesn't bust them on what is straight forward cloaking.
    - MichaelGG 16y ago
      Oh, you're right. I agree, any site that displays significantly different content when coming from a Google search should be heavily penalized.
arnemart 16y ago
Experts Exchange.
michaelcampbell 16y ago
experts-exchange.com
logjam 16y ago
efreedom, experts exchange, ehow. Would be interesting to have collective access to what people are blocking. I like the approach...being able to click and exclude based on the search results that pop up.
jmillikin 16y ago
ehow, experts-exchange, questionhub/efreedom/etc
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
cellis 16y ago
markmail, osdir. these sites basically mirror yahoo/google groups. Big source of frustration.
- basugasubaku 16y ago
  markmail provides the best archives of Apache project mailing lists that I've seen. Many of the project sites link to the markmail archive. And it's ad free. Compare for example the Apache archives of CouchDB (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/ http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/) to Markmail archives (http://couchdb.markmail.org/search/?q http://couchdb.markmail.org/search/?q). The former is searchable; the other isn't.
- comforteagle 16y ago
  as replied up the thread... [I run osdir.com] Just to be clear we're not scraping content nor SEOing to death. We've been running our mailing list archive for almost 8 years. To quote Matt_Cutts somewhere else in this thread: 'because USENET/mailing lists don't always have a centralized/canonical location on the web, which makes dupe content more of a potential issue. It's not the usual "Website X copied my website" scenario.' If you dislike us that's cool, but just know we're not showing in your SERPs because of scraping & SEO trickery. A lot of people, maybe not you, really are finding their answer there. There's a lot of solid answers in inboxes.
  - cellis 16y ago
    I see. I bear you no ill will. I just happened to one day start seeing LOTS of osdir and markmail results in my searches. And it's not even that I mind what osdir does (I did find answers there), but that it's UI is worse than the original site and I feel that the originals should be given higher weight.
    - comforteagle 16y ago
      Hey cellis, thanks. What I see in cases where we come up higher in SERPs is that the crawler just hasn't found the best content in google groups yet, if ever. I scratch my head over that one too, but ours is not to reason why. I don't see the index pointing to the same content in the landing pages typically either with my queries. UI: LOL, yeah, it's a toss up here whether to make it prettier or keep it a bit old school.
kaffeinecoma 16y ago
devcomments.com. osdir.com, and mail-archive.com
kyenneti 16y ago
As mentioned above - bytes.com and bigresource.com
- mambodog 16y ago
  Definitely Bigresource if you're doing anything with Flash/Flex.
bill-nordwall 16y ago
A few more: http://www.google.com/search?q=hubpages http://www.google.com/search?q=hubpages http://www.google.com/search?q=ezine+articles http://www.google.com/search?q=ezine+articles http://www.google.com/search?q=all+experts http://www.google.com/search?q=all+experts
- IChrisI 16y ago
  I added +-hubpages to my keyword search in Firefox. I should probably look into an extension instead, but it works well enough. I like the idea of Google getting lots of searches for <random query> -hubpages
Natsu 16y ago
eHow. They appear to be connected with a spambot that's attacking random wikis. They might not be part of it, but even if not, I won't feel too bad about blocking them.

My first round includes eHow, Mahalo, Associated Content, Experts Exchange, Squidoo and Examiner. Update: I added answers.yahoo.com as well, which has consistently terrible content and yet is often highly ranked.

klbarry 16y ago
I really often get exactly the answer I need from Yahoo Answers, just to throw that in there...
- jonknee 16y ago
  I have only ever seen incorrect answers on Yahoo Answers, so our experiences definitely vary. That's the beauty of allowing custom blocklists though.
- pamelafox 16y ago
  I've found that there are some more taboo (but valid) questions that are only ever answered on Yahoo! Answers, presumably because people aren't worried about their identity there. For an extreme example: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071113122412AAHwZQD http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071113122412AA... (Warning: Taboo. And the answer probably isn't relevant to 95% of the posters here. :)
  - jonknee 16y ago
    I found Wikipedia's answer to be of much higher quality (and properly cited).
MichaelGG 16y ago
Experts Exchange used to be a scam, showing fake results. But now, they just roll them to the bottom of the page. I don't endorse them or like them, but they've had decent quality answers several times.
- jonknee 16y ago
  They play too many dirty tricks for my tastes (for example, it's only at the bottom of the page when you come from Google)--I won't give them any of my page views. I have no idea why Google doesn't bust them on what is straight forward cloaking.
  - MichaelGG 16y ago
    Oh, you're right. I agree, any site that displays significantly different content when coming from a Google search should be heavily penalized.

arnemart 16y ago

Experts Exchange.

michaelcampbell 16y ago

experts-exchange.com

logjam 16y ago

efreedom, experts exchange, ehow. Would be interesting to have collective access to what people are blocking. I like the approach...being able to click and exclude based on the search results that pop up.

jmillikin 16y ago

ehow, experts-exchange, questionhub/efreedom/etc

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

cellis 16y ago

markmail, osdir. these sites basically mirror yahoo/google groups. Big source of frustration.

basugasubaku 16y ago
markmail provides the best archives of Apache project mailing lists that I've seen. Many of the project sites link to the markmail archive. And it's ad free. Compare for example the Apache archives of CouchDB (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/ http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/) to Markmail archives (http://couchdb.markmail.org/search/?q http://couchdb.markmail.org/search/?q). The former is searchable; the other isn't.
comforteagle 16y ago
as replied up the thread... [I run osdir.com] Just to be clear we're not scraping content nor SEOing to death. We've been running our mailing list archive for almost 8 years. To quote Matt_Cutts somewhere else in this thread: 'because USENET/mailing lists don't always have a centralized/canonical location on the web, which makes dupe content more of a potential issue. It's not the usual "Website X copied my website" scenario.' If you dislike us that's cool, but just know we're not showing in your SERPs because of scraping & SEO trickery. A lot of people, maybe not you, really are finding their answer there. There's a lot of solid answers in inboxes.
- cellis 16y ago
  I see. I bear you no ill will. I just happened to one day start seeing LOTS of osdir and markmail results in my searches. And it's not even that I mind what osdir does (I did find answers there), but that it's UI is worse than the original site and I feel that the originals should be given higher weight.
  - comforteagle 16y ago
    Hey cellis, thanks. What I see in cases where we come up higher in SERPs is that the crawler just hasn't found the best content in google groups yet, if ever. I scratch my head over that one too, but ours is not to reason why. I don't see the index pointing to the same content in the landing pages typically either with my queries. UI: LOL, yeah, it's a toss up here whether to make it prettier or keep it a bit old school.

kaffeinecoma 16y ago

devcomments.com. osdir.com, and mail-archive.com

kyenneti 16y ago

As mentioned above - bytes.com and bigresource.com

mambodog 16y ago
Definitely Bigresource if you're doing anything with Flash/Flex.

bill-nordwall 16y ago

A few more: http://www.google.com/search?q=hubpages http://www.google.com/search?q=hubpages http://www.google.com/search?q=ezine+articles http://www.google.com/search?q=ezine+articles http://www.google.com/search?q=all+experts http://www.google.com/search?q=all+experts

IChrisI 16y ago
I added +-hubpages to my keyword search in Firefox. I should probably look into an extension instead, but it works well enough. I like the idea of Google getting lots of searches for <random query> -hubpages

Natsu 16y ago

eHow. They appear to be connected with a spambot that's attacking random wikis. They might not be part of it, but even if not, I won't feel too bad about blocking them.