

Spolksy and Atwood's StackOver is a huge success - staunch
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com/

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old-gregg
I have a question for frequent SO posters: what do you get out of it? I like
more choices and I think the resource is fantastic for googling, kudos to
Jeff&Joel, but in my case, when googling doesn't help and I need to ask
someone, it just seems that IRC beats it hands down: why would I go to SO
asking jQuery questions if there's #jquery on freenode where John often
answers questions himself? With something like jRuby or Linux hosting the
picture is even better: JRuby lead programmers always hang out in #jruby,
bunch of smart folks helping each other in real time.

Whereas I see people ask a question on SO and... what exactly do they do next?
Sit for hours hitting 'refresh' every minute or so? SO is great for googling
for similar questions answered in the past, but I just don't understand why
people post questions there in the first place.

Sometimes I think that if IRC hasn't existed and someone would have launched
it now as a fresh idea, all tech blogs would be filled with _"IRC changes
everything"_ and _"the game is over for slow HTML-based collaboration"_

Am I missing something?

~~~
ijntybvrt
You can search SO, you can see the dozens of other answers to similar
questions and you can see other answers by the person answering you. Realtime
works for some set of easy quick answers - if the answerers are in your time
zone.

~~~
daleharvey
I am pretty sure its the opposite, a complicated questions needs a feedback
mechanism, you say X is wrong, I ask well what happens with Y, whats the
output of Z. this really works better in realtime.

I find a lot of application / language / library developers are in irc
reasonably often, whereas the questions on forums are a bit more of run of the
mill how do I do types

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spolsky
(a) It's Spolsky (b) compete.com is low by a factor of > 6\. We had 2,373,587
unique visitors in the last month.

~~~
spolsky
Conclusion: compete.com has absolutely no respectable data, so don't look
there.

~~~
staunch
Sorry about the name typo (<pre coffee excuse>). Although the absolute numbers
are always wildly inaccurate, Compete tends to be fairly good at viewing the
traffic trends for a site. Or does the chart look nothing like your own
internal ones?

~~~
abstractbill
_Compete tends to be fairly good at viewing the traffic trends for a site_

No it doesn't. Their graphs for Justin.TV traffic aren't even usually the same
_shape_ as the real thing.

~~~
defunkt
Same with GitHub.

~~~
jim-greer
Same with Kongregate. Alexa is somewhat better. We use Quantcast's tracking
pixel so you can see the real numbers.

~~~
dshah
The shape of the graph for grader.com is pretty close to the real thing (and
eerily the same as Stackoverflow.com).

[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+grader.co...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+grader.com/?metric=uv)

(Which is surprising. Grader.com is nowhere near as useful).

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lbrandy
Poor Jeff. Did most of the work, and his name still comes second. I feel for
you, man.

------
kstenson
I think that StackOverflow.com growth now is being pushed more by the organic
search results from google and the praise being sung by ordinary users in
blogs and forums.

I think the site is excellent, and looking forward to more growth as more eyes
provide better questions/answers!

------
alexandros
yet experts-exchange remains strong
[http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+experts-e...](http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+experts-
exchange.com/?metric=uv)

~~~
henning
I don't suppose that has anything to do with their blatant use of blackhat SEO
tactics. If StackOverflow wants to be to Expert Sex Change what Facebook is to
MySpace, more power to them.

~~~
jacquesm
I wished there was a way to tell google to never ever include another result
from a certain domain.

Not just the one page, no, everything. I'd subscribe as a paying customer if
they offered that feature.

~~~
kirubakaran
I created a custom Google search for you here:
[http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=014099110326932841740%3Aoy...](http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=014099110326932841740%3Aoyyrj_lqsaa)

Now, how would like to make the payment? ;)

You can also just add _-site:expertsexchange.com -site:experts-exchange.com_
to your keywords.

~~~
jacquesm
Hehe, ok :)

Wire transfer ? Pay Pal ? Cheque ? Cash ? My firstborn is spoken for.

Amazing, that's what I get for shooting my mouth off.

The funniest thing is I do something just like this on a site that I own to
search for music files removing all the fake sites, but I never thought of
using it to improve my regular searches. I simply used a submit form that sets
the source of an iframe to googles result page. Works dandy.

Thank you once again, you had me laughing there!

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mickt
They're getting a lot of traffic, but is it really a success; are people
learning or getting or understanding the best answers to their questions?

Are there enough smarties (experienced smart programmers) on the forum to
answer all the inane newbie (inexperienced programmers) questions? And if
there's too many newbies it's possible that incorrect or sub-optimal answers
will get voted up because there aren't enough smarties to realise what are
optimal answers.

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jli
I'm surprised how they got a huge audience so fast. When I search for answers
to technical problems on google, they appear on top results very often.

~~~
asmosoinio
Me too! Last few weeks I have been working with Python (which makes me smile
after Java and C++) and looked up plenty of stuff like "how to elegantly get
first day of week N", and about 50% of my questions were answered in SO.

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staunch
I knew they'd be able to use their existing audiences to push the site but I
think this is probably more than that. If the trend continues they really are
going to have a huge amount of traffic and make a ton of money. I'm impressed.

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rsobers
Okay great - but how do you monetize it now?

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adityakothadiya
Check this TwitPic's success!
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitpic.com/?metric=uv> One man show, and
amazing growth of small little Twitter app!

