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The power of Google: how the Panda update hit Experts Exchange

121 points by bensummers 15y ago

dicroce 15y ago
If you don't want Google to have that power, don't use their search engine. Personally, I like seeing expert sex change less...
- dasil003 15y ago
  Won't someone please think of the transsexuals?
vidarh 15y ago
I agree with him that Google's power is worrying to some extent, but with respect to Experts Exchange: Good riddance. Their horrible faux pay-wall really deserve to be ranked down hard.
jawns 15y ago
I'm taking a page from Experts Exchange: The comment that originally occupied this space is now behind a paywall (or, if you want to get technical, it's buried down further in the thread, and you now have to scroll through a bunch of other stuff to find it). It begins with "Experts Exchange currently displays ..." That's right, I've capitalized on the Hacker News "comment juice" my original comment received and the above-the-fold real estate it garnered, effectively "cloaking" my original answer. Annoying, isn't it?
- robin_reala 15y ago
  Stack Overflow is also a business and also trying to make money doing the same thing, but it does it in a way that’s much better for the site user. I’m not surprised that it’s doing better than EE in the search results these days.
- dpcan 15y ago
  That's not really fair. At one time, cloaking data was a good way to get found and still put up a pay wall. They built a business around being able to do this. Shady folks turned this practice into a method of deception. Experts exchange was only hiding from view REAL data that they were selling access to, and to let us know they had the data we needed, they found a way to show it to google. At least they didn't fill pages with bogus questions without answers and a ton of keywords. The only part of EE I don't care for is that they want us to pay for data they didn't create, however, the experts are probably aware they will not get paid when answering.
  - jawns 15y ago
    "At one time, cloaking data was a good way to get found and still put up a pay wall." It was good for the business maybe, but never -- not then and not now -- good for the user.
    - dpcan 15y ago
      Nobody EVER said it had to be. They had data. It was GOOD data, and they wanted to be paid for it, but they had to tell Google they had it so people could find it. It's how advertising works. Look what we have! Come buy it.
      - mrgoldenbrown 15y ago
        Advertising is saying "free ice cream this weekend at EE's ice cream shop". What EE does though is say "free ice cream" in their ad on tv, and then inform customers at the cash register that the ice cream is only free if you purchase a $50 plastic spoon as well.
        qeorge 15y ago
        Not exactly. I don't recall Experts Exchange ever implying their data was free. It was more like: "You know that flavor you desperately need? We've got it, and we'll show you the box, but if you want to taste it you'll have to pay." Don't get me wrong - I hated EE and I'm glad to see them gone from Google, but I don't think they implied their content was free.
- a_m0d 15y ago
  Part of the problem, though, is that they don't always show you the same results as the search engine sees. I've just started using the SSL version of Google search, and now I no longer see any answers on the EE pages, where I did before. It looks like they only display the answers in the bare minimum number of case necessary to still get search rankings, rather than displaying them for all google referrers.
  - cobbal 15y ago
    If you're going from an HTTPS site to a HTTP site, then your browser doesn't send a referer header, so they can't really know you came from google.
    - a_m0d 15y ago
      True, but it still does break google's requirement that the page Google sees must be the same as the one Google's user sees (which was the original reason they did this anyway).
- jawns 15y ago
  Experts Exchange currently displays its answers for free at the very bottom of its pages, but it misleads visitors into thinking that they have to pay for access. Unless you scroll through about eight pages' worth of filler, you would never know that the answers are there. And EE would love for them not to be there, but search engines won't index them otherwise. That's actually an improvement from some of their earlier tactics, which involved cloaking (serving one version of the site -- with the answers -- to search engines and a different version to everyone else). The only reason they're not still cloaking is because search engines have gotten wise to their methods and won't tolerate it. In short, Experts Exchange is willing to mislead people and search engines in any way that it can get away with. So, at least in EE's case, the fact that Google has tightened the screws is great. (I should mention that I understand EE is a business and is trying to make a profit -- but profiting from deception is what really riles me.)
  - Too 15y ago
    > Experts Exchange currently displays its answers for free at the very bottom of its pages, but it misleads visitors into thinking that they have to pay for access. Only if you reach the site with a google.com referrer. Without referrer there's no answers at the bottom.
    - astrodust 15y ago
      So basically "boo hoo" that they're not getting any rank. Stack Overflow is a business too, but it's one worth supporting.
    - adgar 15y ago
      I just checked this, and it's true. Googled "experts exchange fix mod_rewrite," tried a resulting question as referred and in an incognito window. Only the former had the results at the bottom. Notably, even if you're using secure google search because you're logged in, the referrer still gets sent - so it still works. I know some people were concerned referrers didn't get passed from the new "secure if logged in" option - this seems a decent confirmation they do.
  - deleted 15y ago
- dpcan 15y ago
  You NEVER said "annoying". You used the terms "mislead" and "deception". THIS is annoying.
garyrichardson 15y ago
I don't think it has anything to do with Googles algorithm. Over the years, I've had various browser plugins to hide EE results from my searches. Various upgrades meant I had to find new plugins every 10 months or so. Now it's easy for everyone. I hit the 'remove Experts Exchange from search results' button the first time I saw it. I hope Google is using remove from search results as a signal in their ranking. I think it's a fair way to weight.
- chadgeidel 15y ago
  I hope Google looks at "remove from search results" but I hope they don't allow that button to remove the results from the official ranking. That's easier to game than PageRank was.
reduxredacted 15y ago
I'm happy with the reduction in Experts Exchange content in my search (I won't get into that at the moment, just to say that I usually find better quality content on other sites). Unfortunately, I still run into a myriad of copy/paste sites, which when compared against Exerpts Exchange, are far worse, and Google's UI has made it less simple to ban the sites. I've had to manually block "unifiedpeople.ru", "mvp.itcommunity.ru", "boardreader.com" and "efreedom.com" in order to clean up search results related to topics I'm regularly seeking answers. They generally copy/paste from a variety of forums (and maybe even legally so), but they present a less up-to-date version than the site they're copying and often the code highlighting and other formatting is completely stripped rendering a very difficult to read result. Yet they often rank higher than that from which they copied. The sites are marginally useful and were a problem before and after Panda. Google, being in a very powerful position, does have a lot of control over things like this, however, they also are going to be the most targetted. I've found, in some cases, their closest competitor (the one that used to be very blue) occasionally provides cleaner results, especially if the query involves their own products--a circumstance that was not always the case.
- sunchild 15y ago
  'Excerpts Exchange" is pretty much dead-on.
- eru 15y ago
  You might want to try duckduckgo. They have quite an aggressive stance against the sites you are complaining about.
dlikhten 15y ago
The #1 discussion on google for filtering websites was basically "How do I stop experts-exchange from appearing in my results?" However this is what the antitrust hearings were about, its scary how trafficers of information control perception of the world.
Hisoka 15y ago
I think the days of building a content site that relies on search is over... everyday millions of new pages are populating the web, and Google is becoming stricter in their algorithm. If you're building a site, you need to make sure it's a) something engaging that people will want to visit over and over b) something that can be marketed in ways that doesn't rely on search such as word of mouth, social media sharing (preferably built into the product like FourSquare) c) uses a channel to make sure one-time visitors convert to regular visitors. Such as daily newsletters/emails.
nhebb 15y ago
Here's my recent experience doing programming related searches: - Perform multiple keyword search on Google for esoteric topic. - Get a page of results that don't include all keywords (remember, can't use '+' anymore). - Switch to Bing and perform search. - Get page of relevant results, but EE is near top of list. I can't win either way. :(
- gtani 15y ago
  Dev-related search is difficult for a lot of reasons: - you need to search for "<:<" or the F# "as" keyword - there's lots of mailing list mirrors (gmane, osdir, nabble, markmail) with lousy UI's and google seems to push their Google groups search hits way down to page 2, or "Repeat search with duplicate results shown" - new stackoverflow clones or whatever uncomplementary term keep popping up
- ams6110 15y ago
  Try DuckDuckGo.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Old: +apples +oranges New: "apples" "oranges" Google do a remarkable job at accurately guessing what most people want from a bunch of search terms. It's not always right, but still, it is impressive. Or try DuckDuckGo.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    Way way back the reason Google succeeded over other SE for me was that they required all terms and that they made sure relevancy by checking that the terms were used in proper context on the page (eg not stuffed, not font-color hidden, etc.). Now, it seems I can't do a straight search, even quoted text returns results that don't contain the string I'm looking for it's highly frustrating. It must be working for others but when I need to use Google for anything serious now (rather than a general query) it is a lot harder to get it to return good results at the top of the SERPs. The worst are the 1st-result-has-none-of-your-keywords type queries. Aagh! At least they used to placate you with "pages pointing to this result use that keyword".
Achshar 15y ago
really stop using alexa. http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/29/anti-web-analytics/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/29/anti-web-analytics/
- skanuj 15y ago
  Really stop reading Techcrunch :)
  - dendory 15y ago
    No he's actually right, Alexa provides unbelievably bad results, completely irrelevant to anyone.
    - TeMPOraL 15y ago
      Could someone explain to me why people even consider results collected via third-party browser toolbar to be relevant in any way[1]? I mean... I don't remember ever seeing anyone in IT with a browser toolbar, and I remove them on the spot from my non-IT friends' browsers. Call it selection bias, but I think that most of the time someone has a toolbar of this type is when one's IT friends haven't have time to get to ones computer and remove it. [1] - this is a serious question that bothers me; I can't see how this kind of selection gives any kind of representative sample.
      - Haplo 15y ago
        I don't understand why something either has to be totally perfect information or totally useless. Yes, Alexa information is pretty bad. Yes, it is easily faked. Yes, it isn't representative. Yes, browser toolbar usage is probably declining. However, that doesn't mean that Alexa information cannot be used as an indication of big traffic trends considering there is a difference between absolute traffic levels and relative changes in traffic levels. To give a different example. Let's say that you have a website with decent traffic levels and you collect browser usage statistics (e.g. 50% IE, 40% FF, 10% Chrome). Of course those are not representative for global browser usage. But if Chrome usage doubles for that group, it can be used as an indication for a trend in global browser usage.
edcrfv 15y ago
I don't think the Panda update got it right with respect to the duplicate content problem though. I still see a bunch of StackOverflow content scrapers rank as high as StackOverflow and basically link back to StackOverflow. To the same post that is ranked number 1 for that particular query. Don't have examples right away - checking my history for those instances One site I can remember is bigresource.com which is an aggregator of sorts, it seems The larger problem being, sites with duplicate content still rank as high as the original.
dendory 15y ago
HAH! That was my first reaction to this. I hated doing a search and ending up on that site, and they owned a lot of page 1 results for many keywords. I cringed every time I would realize I had ended up on that site, could see the clearly user-provided questions, and then the annoying way they hid the answers and begged for money. If that's the result of Panda, Google gets a big cheer from me.
Matt_Cutts 15y ago
One of the signals that we've said that we use in the Panda algorithm that launched in April is how many users blocked a particular site. A new launch last week is that you can now import blocked sites from Chrome into Google.com. That way your blocked sites will work wherever you sign in. More info: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-blocklist-from-chrome.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-b...
- tomjen3 15y ago
  That reminds me, have you removed the blocking function or does it only work in Chrome? I tried to find a manual for a particular dishwasher today. Holy crap was the search results useless. With the exception of a site which didn't load and one which was a list of people who wanted to know if anybody else had the manual all other results of the three first pages where made for adsense sites or sites designed to harvest email address. Which would have been one thing, but not one of them had the damn manual (one tried to suggest the manual for a Macbook air!?). So it seems you still have a long way to go with Panda. But the reason I ask is that I couldn't figure out how to ban those sites (I was using my iPad at the time).
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    Which dishwasher manual where you searching for? I'd like to do a comparative study of the various search engines and see what I can get.
    - tomjen3 15y ago
      WQP8-9001 My search terms were: WQP8 9001 user guide and WQP8 9001 manual
  - Maxious 15y ago
    For me, it works such that you go to a crappy site, navigate backwards to the search results and then a link "- Block all crappysite.com results" appears. It also mentions you need to be "signed in to search".
aeturnum 15y ago
Though I worry about how much power Google wields, I think this is a bad example. EE and its ilk are designed to rank as high as possible on Google specifically. Their whole product was (more or less) SCO - if they could have ranked higher without content, their pages would be empty aside from ads. Their only purpose is to draw eyeballs to ads - if they didn't appear on Google, no one would use them. Ranking aggregation lower than original sources is a reasonable optimization and the huge traffic impact was caused by the unusual entanglement with Google's specific algorithmic implementation.
mcherm 15y ago
I disliked getting expert exchange In my list of search results. But that doesn't change your main thesis that this is too much power for one company.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
This is an excellent set of comments, they go all over the map from 'their evil' to 'its just business' to 'I miss them'. My feeling is that Experts Exchange is just one of a number of new enterprises for which they are trying to price the value of information. The marginal cost of providing the same information to a second, third, or 10,000th question seeker is the same (and quite small) and the value of that information varies between seekers as does the value of time. So we see a variety of strategies for pricing that value. The reference market in general seems to be a candidate for this sort of disruption, and while many found EE distasteful my understanding is that Joel started StackOverflow because he valued the information in EE but found the pricing (in terms of crap he had to wade through) extortionate. So he took the concept one step forward. No doubt someone will learn from his experience and take it further still.
- Eric_Peterson 15y ago
  New? EE started in 1996. If anyone's a copycat, it's SO, and they weren't even the first. EE went the venture capital route in the last century, and did exactly what SO is doing now: burning through money trying to build eyeballs with no business plan other than taking venture capital money. It failed then, and it will fail now because the revenue stream doesn't support the increased costs. EE tried the advertising model in the early 2000s: get lots of eyes, sell ads and pay the bills with that. It failed then, and it will fail now; only a few companies have sufficient traffic to be profitable (Google and Facebook lead the list, but everyone else needs some other revenue, or needs to share content (like the NYTimes does) to help offset costs. The only business model that works AND SCALES is to charge for services rendered, like your cable company does. like your ISP does and like your plumber does. Did EE implement it in the best possible way? Nope. Instead it followed Google's rules for SEO, and got punished for it because it was better at it than anyone else. So it's rebuilding itself: http://beta.experts-exchange.com http://beta.experts-exchange.com . Did its members like it? Nope, but that didn't stop the company from doing it, and now they're listening to their members more because it turns out the members' warnings were right -- because they've been there before. When SO starts putting all kinds of ads in your face and you start complaining like frightened banshees and nothing happens, you can cash in your reputation points and find another site that will have the same magic bullet SO does. When Quora starts tracking every little thing you do to "personalize the experience" just remember that its roots are in Facebook -- and the goal is to turn you into the product, because that's what advertising based sites do; they can't sell ads without it. EE is honest. You're not the product; you're the customer, even if -- especially if -- you're the one answering questions.
wastedbrains 15y ago
Experts Exchange is such a bad site, glad it was blocked.
wastedbrains 15y ago
Experts Exchange is such a bad site, glad it was blocked.
uvTwitch 15y ago
Well they're right about the new algorithm preferring high-quality sites; now I no longer have to manually ignore results from expert sexchange anymore!
rjd 15y ago
I'm a big outposken critic of Google, I've disliked them for a long time. But IMO I see no wrong here. If your business relies on Google to survive you don't have a good business, you need to do some introspection and reevaluate your business. The update was beneficial to the interest of Google users. Those users aren't forced to use Google. And even though Google is huge and gets great boons because of its size, it is also on a knife edge that could come toppling down because of a technological break through, or advertising collapse. In all respects Facebook is big enough to force that to happen (at least on an advertising front), but it could always come from an unexpected area as well. (granted that a technological breakthrough seems doubtful, but often thats where the biggest surprises emerge)
- jason1178 15y ago
  The update was beneficial to Google, not necessarily to its users. A lot of Google properties (Demand Media, anyone?) that are clearly content farms climbed up the rankings while good sites like Stack, DaniWeb, and yes...Experts Exchange got nailed. In DaniWeb's case, she got nailed twice by two different updates. The problem here is Google is selling the ads and also determining the traffic to the ads. It's too much in one place and ripe for abuse and the abuse seems to be happening
brc 15y ago
The issue with Panda is that it tilts the playing field towards brands. This, along with predictive searches and Google-owned companies filling out search engine results, makes it much harder for newer sites to come in and gain traffic. While it's good that scraping sites get heavily hit, what's not so good is that it will become very difficult for a future startup to gain a foothold in an existing industry. The likes of stackoverflow overtaking EE in a short time frame might become less in the future. Much of Google search results is becoming useless with spam pollution, but at the same time, they have to be careful they don't just solidify searches around already 'knowns'. The true utility of search is turning up unexpected good results from time to time.
- a5seo 15y ago
  To your point, Demand Media now focuses primarily on putting their content on brand sites and rev-sharing. See traveltips.usatoday.com, for example. There's always someone working an angle to game Google.
gsmiley 15y ago
Experts Exchange is responding with a new version of the site: http://beta.experts-exchange.com http://beta.experts-exchange.com
jason1178 15y ago
Experts Exchange is not scamming anyone: you, google, whomever. All they did was play Google's game by Google's rules with first-click free and did it better than anyone else for a long time. Now that Google has changed the rules, EE will change too. There's a new site in beta testing and given the Panda restrictions it will almost have to be a freemium model in order to compete.

121 points by bensummers 15y ago

If you don't want Google to have that power, don't use their search engine. Personally, I like seeing expert sex change less...

dasil003 15y ago
Won't someone please think of the transsexuals?

vidarh 15y ago

I agree with him that Google's power is worrying to some extent, but with respect to Experts Exchange: Good riddance. Their horrible faux pay-wall really deserve to be ranked down hard.

jawns 15y ago

I'm taking a page from Experts Exchange: The comment that originally occupied this space is now behind a paywall (or, if you want to get technical, it's buried down further in the thread, and you now have to scroll through a bunch of other stuff to find it). It begins with "Experts Exchange currently displays ..." That's right, I've capitalized on the Hacker News "comment juice" my original comment received and the above-the-fold real estate it garnered, effectively "cloaking" my original answer. Annoying, isn't it?

robin_reala 15y ago
Stack Overflow is also a business and also trying to make money doing the same thing, but it does it in a way that’s much better for the site user. I’m not surprised that it’s doing better than EE in the search results these days.
dpcan 15y ago
That's not really fair. At one time, cloaking data was a good way to get found and still put up a pay wall. They built a business around being able to do this. Shady folks turned this practice into a method of deception. Experts exchange was only hiding from view REAL data that they were selling access to, and to let us know they had the data we needed, they found a way to show it to google. At least they didn't fill pages with bogus questions without answers and a ton of keywords. The only part of EE I don't care for is that they want us to pay for data they didn't create, however, the experts are probably aware they will not get paid when answering.
- jawns 15y ago
  "At one time, cloaking data was a good way to get found and still put up a pay wall." It was good for the business maybe, but never -- not then and not now -- good for the user.
  - dpcan 15y ago
    Nobody EVER said it had to be. They had data. It was GOOD data, and they wanted to be paid for it, but they had to tell Google they had it so people could find it. It's how advertising works. Look what we have! Come buy it.
    - mrgoldenbrown 15y ago
      Advertising is saying "free ice cream this weekend at EE's ice cream shop". What EE does though is say "free ice cream" in their ad on tv, and then inform customers at the cash register that the ice cream is only free if you purchase a $50 plastic spoon as well.
      - qeorge 15y ago
        Not exactly. I don't recall Experts Exchange ever implying their data was free. It was more like: "You know that flavor you desperately need? We've got it, and we'll show you the box, but if you want to taste it you'll have to pay." Don't get me wrong - I hated EE and I'm glad to see them gone from Google, but I don't think they implied their content was free.
a_m0d 15y ago
Part of the problem, though, is that they don't always show you the same results as the search engine sees. I've just started using the SSL version of Google search, and now I no longer see any answers on the EE pages, where I did before. It looks like they only display the answers in the bare minimum number of case necessary to still get search rankings, rather than displaying them for all google referrers.
- cobbal 15y ago
  If you're going from an HTTPS site to a HTTP site, then your browser doesn't send a referer header, so they can't really know you came from google.
  - a_m0d 15y ago
    True, but it still does break google's requirement that the page Google sees must be the same as the one Google's user sees (which was the original reason they did this anyway).
jawns 15y ago
Experts Exchange currently displays its answers for free at the very bottom of its pages, but it misleads visitors into thinking that they have to pay for access. Unless you scroll through about eight pages' worth of filler, you would never know that the answers are there. And EE would love for them not to be there, but search engines won't index them otherwise. That's actually an improvement from some of their earlier tactics, which involved cloaking (serving one version of the site -- with the answers -- to search engines and a different version to everyone else). The only reason they're not still cloaking is because search engines have gotten wise to their methods and won't tolerate it. In short, Experts Exchange is willing to mislead people and search engines in any way that it can get away with. So, at least in EE's case, the fact that Google has tightened the screws is great. (I should mention that I understand EE is a business and is trying to make a profit -- but profiting from deception is what really riles me.)
- Too 15y ago
  > Experts Exchange currently displays its answers for free at the very bottom of its pages, but it misleads visitors into thinking that they have to pay for access. Only if you reach the site with a google.com referrer. Without referrer there's no answers at the bottom.
  - astrodust 15y ago
    So basically "boo hoo" that they're not getting any rank. Stack Overflow is a business too, but it's one worth supporting.
  - adgar 15y ago
    I just checked this, and it's true. Googled "experts exchange fix mod_rewrite," tried a resulting question as referred and in an incognito window. Only the former had the results at the bottom. Notably, even if you're using secure google search because you're logged in, the referrer still gets sent - so it still works. I know some people were concerned referrers didn't get passed from the new "secure if logged in" option - this seems a decent confirmation they do.
- deleted 15y ago
dpcan 15y ago
You NEVER said "annoying". You used the terms "mislead" and "deception". THIS is annoying.

garyrichardson 15y ago

I don't think it has anything to do with Googles algorithm. Over the years, I've had various browser plugins to hide EE results from my searches. Various upgrades meant I had to find new plugins every 10 months or so. Now it's easy for everyone. I hit the 'remove Experts Exchange from search results' button the first time I saw it. I hope Google is using remove from search results as a signal in their ranking. I think it's a fair way to weight.

chadgeidel 15y ago
I hope Google looks at "remove from search results" but I hope they don't allow that button to remove the results from the official ranking. That's easier to game than PageRank was.

reduxredacted 15y ago

I'm happy with the reduction in Experts Exchange content in my search (I won't get into that at the moment, just to say that I usually find better quality content on other sites). Unfortunately, I still run into a myriad of copy/paste sites, which when compared against Exerpts Exchange, are far worse, and Google's UI has made it less simple to ban the sites. I've had to manually block "unifiedpeople.ru", "mvp.itcommunity.ru", "boardreader.com" and "efreedom.com" in order to clean up search results related to topics I'm regularly seeking answers. They generally copy/paste from a variety of forums (and maybe even legally so), but they present a less up-to-date version than the site they're copying and often the code highlighting and other formatting is completely stripped rendering a very difficult to read result. Yet they often rank higher than that from which they copied. The sites are marginally useful and were a problem before and after Panda. Google, being in a very powerful position, does have a lot of control over things like this, however, they also are going to be the most targetted. I've found, in some cases, their closest competitor (the one that used to be very blue) occasionally provides cleaner results, especially if the query involves their own products--a circumstance that was not always the case.

sunchild 15y ago
'Excerpts Exchange" is pretty much dead-on.
eru 15y ago
You might want to try duckduckgo. They have quite an aggressive stance against the sites you are complaining about.

dlikhten 15y ago

The #1 discussion on google for filtering websites was basically "How do I stop experts-exchange from appearing in my results?" However this is what the antitrust hearings were about, its scary how trafficers of information control perception of the world.

Hisoka 15y ago

I think the days of building a content site that relies on search is over... everyday millions of new pages are populating the web, and Google is becoming stricter in their algorithm. If you're building a site, you need to make sure it's a) something engaging that people will want to visit over and over b) something that can be marketed in ways that doesn't rely on search such as word of mouth, social media sharing (preferably built into the product like FourSquare) c) uses a channel to make sure one-time visitors convert to regular visitors. Such as daily newsletters/emails.

nhebb 15y ago

Here's my recent experience doing programming related searches: - Perform multiple keyword search on Google for esoteric topic. - Get a page of results that don't include all keywords (remember, can't use '+' anymore). - Switch to Bing and perform search. - Get page of relevant results, but EE is near top of list. I can't win either way. :(

gtani 15y ago
Dev-related search is difficult for a lot of reasons: - you need to search for "<:<" or the F# "as" keyword - there's lots of mailing list mirrors (gmane, osdir, nabble, markmail) with lousy UI's and google seems to push their Google groups search hits way down to page 2, or "Repeat search with duplicate results shown" - new stackoverflow clones or whatever uncomplementary term keep popping up
ams6110 15y ago
Try DuckDuckGo.
DanBC 15y ago
Old: +apples +oranges New: "apples" "oranges" Google do a remarkable job at accurately guessing what most people want from a bunch of search terms. It's not always right, but still, it is impressive. Or try DuckDuckGo.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  Way way back the reason Google succeeded over other SE for me was that they required all terms and that they made sure relevancy by checking that the terms were used in proper context on the page (eg not stuffed, not font-color hidden, etc.). Now, it seems I can't do a straight search, even quoted text returns results that don't contain the string I'm looking for it's highly frustrating. It must be working for others but when I need to use Google for anything serious now (rather than a general query) it is a lot harder to get it to return good results at the top of the SERPs. The worst are the 1st-result-has-none-of-your-keywords type queries. Aagh! At least they used to placate you with "pages pointing to this result use that keyword".

Achshar 15y ago

really stop using alexa. http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/29/anti-web-analytics/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/29/anti-web-analytics/

skanuj 15y ago
Really stop reading Techcrunch :)
- dendory 15y ago
  No he's actually right, Alexa provides unbelievably bad results, completely irrelevant to anyone.
  - TeMPOraL 15y ago
    Could someone explain to me why people even consider results collected via third-party browser toolbar to be relevant in any way[1]? I mean... I don't remember ever seeing anyone in IT with a browser toolbar, and I remove them on the spot from my non-IT friends' browsers. Call it selection bias, but I think that most of the time someone has a toolbar of this type is when one's IT friends haven't have time to get to ones computer and remove it. [1] - this is a serious question that bothers me; I can't see how this kind of selection gives any kind of representative sample.
    - Haplo 15y ago
      I don't understand why something either has to be totally perfect information or totally useless. Yes, Alexa information is pretty bad. Yes, it is easily faked. Yes, it isn't representative. Yes, browser toolbar usage is probably declining. However, that doesn't mean that Alexa information cannot be used as an indication of big traffic trends considering there is a difference between absolute traffic levels and relative changes in traffic levels. To give a different example. Let's say that you have a website with decent traffic levels and you collect browser usage statistics (e.g. 50% IE, 40% FF, 10% Chrome). Of course those are not representative for global browser usage. But if Chrome usage doubles for that group, it can be used as an indication for a trend in global browser usage.

edcrfv 15y ago

I don't think the Panda update got it right with respect to the duplicate content problem though. I still see a bunch of StackOverflow content scrapers rank as high as StackOverflow and basically link back to StackOverflow. To the same post that is ranked number 1 for that particular query. Don't have examples right away - checking my history for those instances One site I can remember is bigresource.com which is an aggregator of sorts, it seems The larger problem being, sites with duplicate content still rank as high as the original.

dendory 15y ago

HAH! That was my first reaction to this. I hated doing a search and ending up on that site, and they owned a lot of page 1 results for many keywords. I cringed every time I would realize I had ended up on that site, could see the clearly user-provided questions, and then the annoying way they hid the answers and begged for money. If that's the result of Panda, Google gets a big cheer from me.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago

One of the signals that we've said that we use in the Panda algorithm that launched in April is how many users blocked a particular site. A new launch last week is that you can now import blocked sites from Chrome into Google.com. That way your blocked sites will work wherever you sign in. More info: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-blocklist-from-chrome.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-b...

tomjen3 15y ago
That reminds me, have you removed the blocking function or does it only work in Chrome? I tried to find a manual for a particular dishwasher today. Holy crap was the search results useless. With the exception of a site which didn't load and one which was a list of people who wanted to know if anybody else had the manual all other results of the three first pages where made for adsense sites or sites designed to harvest email address. Which would have been one thing, but not one of them had the damn manual (one tried to suggest the manual for a Macbook air!?). So it seems you still have a long way to go with Panda. But the reason I ask is that I couldn't figure out how to ban those sites (I was using my iPad at the time).
- ghshephard 15y ago
  Which dishwasher manual where you searching for? I'd like to do a comparative study of the various search engines and see what I can get.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    WQP8-9001 My search terms were: WQP8 9001 user guide and WQP8 9001 manual
- Maxious 15y ago
  For me, it works such that you go to a crappy site, navigate backwards to the search results and then a link "- Block all crappysite.com results" appears. It also mentions you need to be "signed in to search".

aeturnum 15y ago

Though I worry about how much power Google wields, I think this is a bad example. EE and its ilk are designed to rank as high as possible on Google specifically. Their whole product was (more or less) SCO - if they could have ranked higher without content, their pages would be empty aside from ads. Their only purpose is to draw eyeballs to ads - if they didn't appear on Google, no one would use them. Ranking aggregation lower than original sources is a reasonable optimization and the huge traffic impact was caused by the unusual entanglement with Google's specific algorithmic implementation.

mcherm 15y ago

I disliked getting expert exchange In my list of search results. But that doesn't change your main thesis that this is too much power for one company.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

This is an excellent set of comments, they go all over the map from 'their evil' to 'its just business' to 'I miss them'. My feeling is that Experts Exchange is just one of a number of new enterprises for which they are trying to price the value of information. The marginal cost of providing the same information to a second, third, or 10,000th question seeker is the same (and quite small) and the value of that information varies between seekers as does the value of time. So we see a variety of strategies for pricing that value. The reference market in general seems to be a candidate for this sort of disruption, and while many found EE distasteful my understanding is that Joel started StackOverflow because he valued the information in EE but found the pricing (in terms of crap he had to wade through) extortionate. So he took the concept one step forward. No doubt someone will learn from his experience and take it further still.

Eric_Peterson 15y ago
New? EE started in 1996. If anyone's a copycat, it's SO, and they weren't even the first. EE went the venture capital route in the last century, and did exactly what SO is doing now: burning through money trying to build eyeballs with no business plan other than taking venture capital money. It failed then, and it will fail now because the revenue stream doesn't support the increased costs. EE tried the advertising model in the early 2000s: get lots of eyes, sell ads and pay the bills with that. It failed then, and it will fail now; only a few companies have sufficient traffic to be profitable (Google and Facebook lead the list, but everyone else needs some other revenue, or needs to share content (like the NYTimes does) to help offset costs. The only business model that works AND SCALES is to charge for services rendered, like your cable company does. like your ISP does and like your plumber does. Did EE implement it in the best possible way? Nope. Instead it followed Google's rules for SEO, and got punished for it because it was better at it than anyone else. So it's rebuilding itself: http://beta.experts-exchange.com http://beta.experts-exchange.com . Did its members like it? Nope, but that didn't stop the company from doing it, and now they're listening to their members more because it turns out the members' warnings were right -- because they've been there before. When SO starts putting all kinds of ads in your face and you start complaining like frightened banshees and nothing happens, you can cash in your reputation points and find another site that will have the same magic bullet SO does. When Quora starts tracking every little thing you do to "personalize the experience" just remember that its roots are in Facebook -- and the goal is to turn you into the product, because that's what advertising based sites do; they can't sell ads without it. EE is honest. You're not the product; you're the customer, even if -- especially if -- you're the one answering questions.

wastedbrains 15y ago

Experts Exchange is such a bad site, glad it was blocked.

wastedbrains 15y ago

Experts Exchange is such a bad site, glad it was blocked.

uvTwitch 15y ago

Well they're right about the new algorithm preferring high-quality sites; now I no longer have to manually ignore results from expert sexchange anymore!

rjd 15y ago

I'm a big outposken critic of Google, I've disliked them for a long time. But IMO I see no wrong here. If your business relies on Google to survive you don't have a good business, you need to do some introspection and reevaluate your business. The update was beneficial to the interest of Google users. Those users aren't forced to use Google. And even though Google is huge and gets great boons because of its size, it is also on a knife edge that could come toppling down because of a technological break through, or advertising collapse. In all respects Facebook is big enough to force that to happen (at least on an advertising front), but it could always come from an unexpected area as well. (granted that a technological breakthrough seems doubtful, but often thats where the biggest surprises emerge)

jason1178 15y ago
The update was beneficial to Google, not necessarily to its users. A lot of Google properties (Demand Media, anyone?) that are clearly content farms climbed up the rankings while good sites like Stack, DaniWeb, and yes...Experts Exchange got nailed. In DaniWeb's case, she got nailed twice by two different updates. The problem here is Google is selling the ads and also determining the traffic to the ads. It's too much in one place and ripe for abuse and the abuse seems to be happening

brc 15y ago

The issue with Panda is that it tilts the playing field towards brands. This, along with predictive searches and Google-owned companies filling out search engine results, makes it much harder for newer sites to come in and gain traffic. While it's good that scraping sites get heavily hit, what's not so good is that it will become very difficult for a future startup to gain a foothold in an existing industry. The likes of stackoverflow overtaking EE in a short time frame might become less in the future. Much of Google search results is becoming useless with spam pollution, but at the same time, they have to be careful they don't just solidify searches around already 'knowns'. The true utility of search is turning up unexpected good results from time to time.

a5seo 15y ago
To your point, Demand Media now focuses primarily on putting their content on brand sites and rev-sharing. See traveltips.usatoday.com, for example. There's always someone working an angle to game Google.

gsmiley 15y ago

Experts Exchange is responding with a new version of the site: http://beta.experts-exchange.com http://beta.experts-exchange.com

jason1178 15y ago

Experts Exchange is not scamming anyone: you, google, whomever. All they did was play Google's game by Google's rules with first-click free and did it better than anyone else for a long time. Now that Google has changed the rules, EE will change too. There's a new site in beta testing and given the Panda restrictions it will almost have to be a freemium model in order to compete.