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I hope that at some point Google starts pruning away closed SO questions from its index. That will give the user a better search experience.

sre_ops 12y ago
Most importantly, it would delivery such a hit to SO's bottom line that SO would have to figure out how to reign in the "topic closers"
ciupicri 12y ago
As a side note, the closed questions are not deleted from the web site because Stack Exchange takes a conservative approach when it comes to deletion. Nevertheless some questions do get deleted. The Help Center[1] and Meta[2] have more details on this. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions [2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744 http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  > Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators. In my experience, this is completely false, it should be reworded as "Questions that moderators like to remove on a whim". The fact that a moderator (or group of moderators) don't find a question valuable doesn't mean that it is not valuable for the rest of the world, and this applies specifically with questions about recommendations.
slantyyz 12y ago
I hope that they don't. In fact, that's the worst thing they could do. I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results. I don't know what that says about SO's flagging system, but it is what it is, I guess.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  > I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results. Too bad for you, it just takes an overzealous moderator to remove a closed question that many people find valuable. Your best bet is to bookmark the question and trigger archive.org's crawler via the "Save Page Now" form: https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/
chrismcb 12y ago
I hope not. I don't know how many times a question I search for is closed as off topic, but was answered before it was closed

sre_ops 12y ago

Most importantly, it would delivery such a hit to SO's bottom line that SO would have to figure out how to reign in the "topic closers"

ciupicri 12y ago

As a side note, the closed questions are not deleted from the web site because Stack Exchange takes a conservative approach when it comes to deletion. Nevertheless some questions do get deleted. The Help Center[1] and Meta[2] have more details on this. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions [2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744 http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744

Aldo_MX 12y ago
> Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators. In my experience, this is completely false, it should be reworded as "Questions that moderators like to remove on a whim". The fact that a moderator (or group of moderators) don't find a question valuable doesn't mean that it is not valuable for the rest of the world, and this applies specifically with questions about recommendations.

slantyyz 12y ago

I hope that they don't. In fact, that's the worst thing they could do. I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results. I don't know what that says about SO's flagging system, but it is what it is, I guess.

Aldo_MX 12y ago
> I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results. Too bad for you, it just takes an overzealous moderator to remove a closed question that many people find valuable. Your best bet is to bookmark the question and trigger archive.org's crawler via the "Save Page Now" form: https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/

chrismcb 12y ago

I hope not. I don't know how many times a question I search for is closed as off topic, but was answered before it was closed