
Stack Overflow hit 1,000,000 questions last night  - bjonathan
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/millionth-stack-overflow-question/
======
jcnnghm
Stack Overflow is the ultimate long-tail resource. My favorite example of this
is, what I consider to be, a very obscure question I asked then answered about
getting ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-
forwarded...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded-
over-x11-font-problem)) anti-aliased fonts and sub-pixel rendering working
when running java software on a remote X11 server. This sort of thing is
incredibly esoteric, yet, close to 1,000 people have looked at it in the last
year. When I asked the question, and found the answer, there was no useful
information that I could find about it, yet when you search on google today
for 'x11 java anti-alias' the first result is my question, and the second is
someone elses.

We've come a long way since expertsexchange.

~~~
cookiecaper
And now that question would get closed and marked "Belongs on ServerFault"
before anyone could answer it.

~~~
steveklabnik
Wouldn't it just get moved to ServerFault, and then someone would have
answered it, and the Google result would have pointed at ServerFault instead?

~~~
blasdel
No, unfortunately it wouldn't. The google juice is completely concentrated on
the stackoverflow domain — I constantly find insta-moved SO questions at the
top of the search results, with the moved question on SF or SU nowhere to be
found. Yet another defect of their asinine community silo policy.

They don't do a 301 redirect — how would google know where the real question
is?

~~~
codinghorror
we do a 301 redirect if the stub is deleted. We probably should be auto-
deleting the migration stubs after a period of time but haven't gotten to that
quite yet.

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joshhart
I actually have trouble contributing to StackOverflow as much as I'd like. The
community has gotten so good that most questions with my realm (Scala & Java)
seem to be answered within 30 minutes. Since I only look for questions to
answer a few times a week, I never find anything.

At least I can get points by asking good questions.

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robgough
This is great news, if for no other reason that prowling google for answers is
100%[1] more effective than it used to be, as most searches lead me straight
to stackoverflow.

[1] well, 100%-ish. I've not measured this. Nor am I going to.

~~~
markkanof
There seem to be a number of sites that just poorly mirror content from
StackOverflow. They usually have the question and then maybe some answers, but
don't usually include comments to answers or even which answer was marked as
correct.

It's very frustrating when they come up above StackOverflow in Google
searches. I end up slowing down a lot to make sure I don't click on those
results. Sure I could just go straight to StackOverflow which I often do, but
there are other good sources of programming knowledge on the internet that I
want to be able to find too.

These mirror sites are also frustrating because they are blatantly leaching
off of the work of both the StackOverflow developers and the StackOverflow
community. Kind of makes me wish Google did have a blacklist for these cases.

~~~
spolsky
When we find out about these cases, we ask them to conform to our creative
commons license agreement by linking back to stackoverflow.com, in hopes that
ultimately this will teach Google that they are non-canonical and rank them
lower than us.

~~~
brc
That might be so, but right now there's about three of them and they clog up
the search results with essentially the same answer but lower quality for the
reasons mentioned above. So far I've not seen any that outrank stackoverflow,
but it's only a matter of time before one does some blackhat and jumps for
certain questions.

You say that they link back, but in the cases I've seen, they link back with a
slightly different Url form to the one you use.

For example : [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-
tr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925/recreate-stack-trace-with-
line-numbers-from-user-bug-report-in-net) this question appears on scraping
sites (not going to name them for fear of feeding them traffic), but they link
back with this Url: <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1037925> \- which
doesn't resolve back to the longer version. I know there's a canonical link on
it (for the longer url) but I'm wondering if this strategy is working or not.

Maybe it's time to start rejecting some bots crawling the site, or at least to
slow them right down.

It's a problem for Google and for SO, so someone from both places should
probably be talking about it. Because in the end, SO starts looking spammy
because the others are spammy and scrape the content, which is exactly the
opposite case of how things should be. The spam sites are just cloning SO and
shoving crappy ads everywhere, it's not high quality content. When you ask a
question, you want 5 different answers from 5 different site, not the same
answer spammed 5 times back at you.

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ankimal
I m mostly always doing 'site:www.stackoverflow.com how do I do XYZ ?' in
google ..

~~~
cookiecaper
Duck Duck Go makes this a bit easier, just say !so xyz.

~~~
eneveu
Even faster, I've setup "keyword searches" in Firefox
(<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches>). I created the following
bookmark:

    
    
      Name     : [so] Search StackOverflow     // the "[so]" here is just a mnemonic
      Location : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s
      Keyword  : so
    

Then, when I want to search for "vim vs emacs" on SO, I open a new tab (Ctrl +
T), type "so vim vs emacs", and press enter. This searches
"site:stackoverflow.com vim vs emacs" on Google.

I have a similar smart bookmarks setup for HN searches, and you could get more
creative if you want (DuckDuckGo search, or even a custom StackExchange search
like rayvega mentioned, using "<http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s> in the
location field).

Chrome has something similar:
[http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95653)

~~~
edanm
Just to clarify, in Chrome this works automatically. After performing one
search on Stack Overflow, you can now start typing "stack overflow" into the
address bar. As soon as you see that the first autocompletion is
StackOverflow.com, you can hit tab and perform a search.

This works automatically with any site you perform a search on, with no need
to configure anything. One of the main reasons I moved to Chrome after years
of being an FF user.

------
Sukotto
While it's cool they've had a million questions, I feel more interested in
seeing stats on things like:

# non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non)

# questions with an accepted answer

# questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not

~~~
spolsky
Just go here and type in your SQL query:

<http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new>

~~~
Sukotto
Thank you very much for making this data available Joel. This is really
interesting stuff.

------
alanl
My default google query for a programming problem has become.

[keywords] site:stackoverflow.com

And with 1M Q/A it looks like this isn't going to change any time soon!

------
jacoblyles
Congrats and thank you for making the web a better place!

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dnos
Wow, that truly is amazing.

On a funny note: I wonder how many of those questions were answerable by the
first result of a simple google search? :P

~~~
codeslush
My experience tells me that they usually are the first search result in google
-- and when they aren't, I specifically look for them in the search results
because the site is incredibly accurate and useful and I have come to trust
it.

~~~
DrJokepu
Just as a side note, please make sure to upvote both the question and any
helpful answers if you've found the question using Google and it helped you as
that's how Stackoverflow dynamics work.

~~~
walkon
It seems like very few people understand that it doesn't cost anything to
upvote other answers and especially questions. Lots of good questions get
around 0-2 votes, but clearly draw significant activity and interest
otherwise. Are people afraid of point inflation?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
On the StackOverflow podcast they had talked about some of the issues faced
with awarding points for asking questions.

Apparently many people feel that asking a good question isn't worthy of points
(or as many points) as answering a question.

They at one point (IIRC) were awarding points for asking a question, but that
led to people spamming in low quality questions.

My personal rule is that if the question was interesting enough to make me
read it, it should probably be upvoted.

~~~
EliAndrewC
They've also recently created a Gold "Electorate" badge, which is defined as
"Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions." This
should encourage people to vote up good questions as well as good answers.

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retube
Ah dammit. I noticed a couple of days ago the number of questions was at 997k.
I meant to keep an eye out and see if I could ping in number 1 million - but
then promptly forgot.

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blasdel
How many of those are duplicates of existing questions — doesn't heralding
growth contradict the original site goal of wiki-edited QA that stays fresh
forever?

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mike463
Bet they'd have more questions and answers without that stupid third-party
login crap. (OpenID)

