5 ms·

In Joel Spolsky's talk about StackOverflow, he says that one of the 9 key points is that Google is your UI. It sounds that NPR traded a few people paying for t

by lsb 17y ago

In Joel Spolsky's talk about StackOverflow, he says that one of the 9 key points is that Google is your UI. It sounds that NPR traded a few people paying for transcripts to get many more people discovering npr.org.

windsurfer 17y ago
Okay, so lets say Google is your UI. What are you supposed to do about that? Does it matter at all? Everyone elses UI is also Google, if that's the case. So by using Google, you're actually doing yourself a disservice by going with the flow and not innovating. Wouldn't it be awesome if StackOverflow did something better than a google search? Like, say, given a set of programming languages or similar projects, you could get a list of most commonly hit problems for you to avoid in the future. Or they could give you a sort of 20 questions of "did you try this" for certain difficult problems. Or anything else other than search. That's innovating. Accepting your UI to be "Google" is giving up and letting your competitors pass you.
- dantheman 17y ago
  I think you're missing the point; it's not that you should innovate, it's that the majority of your users will be using google and then find your site. You can innovate all you want but if no one knows about it or uses it then it doesn't really matter.
- lsb 17y ago
  Most websites' primary traffic source is search engines, the lion's share of which is Google. Websites that are otherwise are rare, so optimizing your pages to match what people are searching for is pretty important. You can innovate with in-site search, and StackOverflow does, you can browse by tags, you can do string searching, you could even do interesting things with analytics regarding who browses what questions when, but if you can give people a page that corresponds to what people are looking for on Google, then that'll deliver a lot of value.

5 ms·

In Joel Spolsky's talk about StackOverflow, he says that one of the 9 key points is that Google is your UI. It sounds that NPR traded a few people paying for t

by lsb 17y ago

windsurfer 17y ago
Okay, so lets say Google is your UI. What are you supposed to do about that? Does it matter at all? Everyone elses UI is also Google, if that's the case. So by using Google, you're actually doing yourself a disservice by going with the flow and not innovating. Wouldn't it be awesome if StackOverflow did something better than a google search? Like, say, given a set of programming languages or similar projects, you could get a list of most commonly hit problems for you to avoid in the future. Or they could give you a sort of 20 questions of "did you try this" for certain difficult problems. Or anything else other than search. That's innovating. Accepting your UI to be "Google" is giving up and letting your competitors pass you.
- dantheman 17y ago
  I think you're missing the point; it's not that you should innovate, it's that the majority of your users will be using google and then find your site. You can innovate all you want but if no one knows about it or uses it then it doesn't really matter.
- lsb 17y ago
  Most websites' primary traffic source is search engines, the lion's share of which is Google. Websites that are otherwise are rare, so optimizing your pages to match what people are searching for is pretty important. You can innovate with in-site search, and StackOverflow does, you can browse by tags, you can do string searching, you could even do interesting things with analytics regarding who browses what questions when, but if you can give people a page that corresponds to what people are looking for on Google, then that'll deliver a lot of value.