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Google is somewhat good a discerning credibility, IMHO. At least, whenever I search for something I tend to get exactly what I'm looking for without a bunch of

Google is somewhat good a discerning credibility, IMHO. At least, whenever I search for something I tend to get exactly what I'm looking for without a bunch of spammy links. Of course, this could be because most of the stuff I search for is just on Stack Overflow or Wikipedia. :)

yen223 12y ago
StackOverflow ranks answers based on how many upvotes it gets. In other words, it establishes a user's credibility based on his answers' popularity...
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Yeah, but popularity on StackOverflow is related to "does it work for me," a metric that ultimately depends on evaluation by an impartial machine (or a human using their knowledge of the impartial machine to perform the same evaluation). You can't get popular on SO by answering with random snippets from TAOCP. Or maybe you can and I'm missing a business opportunity. A TAOCP+OraclePropaganda bot sounds like something that might make bags and bags of money.
  - ryandrake 12y ago
    How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for? How do you know a GitHub starred/watched repository is really useful and not some job applicant's astroturfing campaign to make it look like their code is widely-used?
    - coldtea 12y ago
      >How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for? Because the quality of the top voted answers speaks for themselves in 99% of the ocassions.
      - Arelius 12y ago
        I disagree, I find surprisingly often, the top one or two voted answers have low quality in many of the types of searches I end up doing on StackOverflow. Ultimately, it ends up being a resonable ranking when you have a smaller set of answers, and a good mod(?) community that's effective at filtering out actual spam.
        reledi 12y ago
        Sometimes a longstanding answer has so many upvotes that it stays at the top even if it's no longer the best answer. In cases like that, there's usually a comment that explains why that method is no longer preferred and what you should do instead -- sometimes pointing to the better answer. And if no such comment exists, be kind and add it.
- muhuk 12y ago
  The more elementary the question, the more upvotes you get. So your credibility is also dependent on the superficiality of the questions you are answering, even more so I'd say.
  - mattgreenrocks 12y ago
    This is the problem: SO ends up favoring more shallow knowledge as time marches on. You can't use popularity metrics to mean anything substantive.
id 12y ago
If you start your search term with the phrase "howto", chances are wikihow.com is among the top results. There are many similar websites who focus on low quality content optimized for search engines.
- muhuk 12y ago
  wikihow is awful. Because it is burying useful content with their superfluous garbage. OTOH StackOverflow employs similar tactics but it is legit and usually useful content. Should Google discriminate between these two? If, yes based on what criteria? (Remember, wikihow pages look like they're user generated, legit content) Is there any objective criteria? I personally would like wikihow to take its place in hell, ehm I mean obscurity. Right next to w3schools.
  - frik 12y ago
    w3schools is at least useful: short API summary plus an example and the pages load a lot faster than Mozilla's MDN

yen223 12y ago

StackOverflow ranks answers based on how many upvotes it gets. In other words, it establishes a user's credibility based on his answers' popularity...

jjoonathan 12y ago
Yeah, but popularity on StackOverflow is related to "does it work for me," a metric that ultimately depends on evaluation by an impartial machine (or a human using their knowledge of the impartial machine to perform the same evaluation). You can't get popular on SO by answering with random snippets from TAOCP. Or maybe you can and I'm missing a business opportunity. A TAOCP+OraclePropaganda bot sounds like something that might make bags and bags of money.
- ryandrake 12y ago
  How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for? How do you know a GitHub starred/watched repository is really useful and not some job applicant's astroturfing campaign to make it look like their code is widely-used?
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for? Because the quality of the top voted answers speaks for themselves in 99% of the ocassions.
    - Arelius 12y ago
      I disagree, I find surprisingly often, the top one or two voted answers have low quality in many of the types of searches I end up doing on StackOverflow. Ultimately, it ends up being a resonable ranking when you have a smaller set of answers, and a good mod(?) community that's effective at filtering out actual spam.
      - reledi 12y ago
        Sometimes a longstanding answer has so many upvotes that it stays at the top even if it's no longer the best answer. In cases like that, there's usually a comment that explains why that method is no longer preferred and what you should do instead -- sometimes pointing to the better answer. And if no such comment exists, be kind and add it.
muhuk 12y ago
The more elementary the question, the more upvotes you get. So your credibility is also dependent on the superficiality of the questions you are answering, even more so I'd say.
- mattgreenrocks 12y ago
  This is the problem: SO ends up favoring more shallow knowledge as time marches on. You can't use popularity metrics to mean anything substantive.

id 12y ago

If you start your search term with the phrase "howto", chances are wikihow.com is among the top results. There are many similar websites who focus on low quality content optimized for search engines.

muhuk 12y ago
wikihow is awful. Because it is burying useful content with their superfluous garbage. OTOH StackOverflow employs similar tactics but it is legit and usually useful content. Should Google discriminate between these two? If, yes based on what criteria? (Remember, wikihow pages look like they're user generated, legit content) Is there any objective criteria? I personally would like wikihow to take its place in hell, ehm I mean obscurity. Right next to w3schools.
- frik 12y ago
  w3schools is at least useful: short API summary plus an example and the pages load a lot faster than Mozilla's MDN