

Stackoverflow Eating Away at Experts-Exchange - heed
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+experts-exchange.com/

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Feynman
About time... I can't be the only one who thinks Experts-Exchange is lame...

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dca
Agreed - they've been corrupting my search results for far too long. Its
refreshing to see this in its place.

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mikeyur
Does google have a blacklist feature? Can I exclude all links from a certain
domain within my google prefs? This needs to be a feature.

I came across 3 or 4 experts-exchange pages today when looking to fix a small
apache issue.

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torpor
add "-site:expertsexchange.com" in your google query to exclude results from
that site ..

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TunaFish
Also, it's not hard to make a keyword search that adds that automatically. On
firefox, left-click the google search box/"Add a keyword for this search",
save it with the keyword "g" somewhere. Then look for it in your bookmarks
menu, right-click/properties and edit the query string until it fits your
tastes. (The %s will get replaced with your search terms.) Mine is like 200
chars long.

After that, you can use g <something> in the address bar to search for
something with a sane query.

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andrewljohnson
I'd say catching, but not eating away.

There's nothing in this graph that suggests market share is being taken away.

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uhytghyt
Except the unique visitors to hyphen also includes those that go there from
Google, find they have to sign up and immediately go away in disgust.

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Evgeny
Actually, when I come there directly from Google, I do not have to login, just
scroll down. However, if I bookmark the page and come back later, I won't see
the answers. If I want to see it again, I have to enter the question title
into Google and re-search, then go directly from Google again. Eeeew!

~~~
fallentimes
How NY Times of them.

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SwellJoe
Good. ExpertSexChange.com is just awful, with their "must be registered to see
this answer" BS. I always groan aloud whenever I accidentally click on a link
in Google search results, since it's just a waste of my time. And, of course,
I go right back to searching.

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enomar
You might already know this, but I believe the answer is always on the landing
page. You just have to scroll all the way down. They put enough crap on the
top of the page to make you think you have to login.

The site is still lame though ;)

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SwellJoe
That must be new (like in the past couple of years). I've been trained out of
considering it worth scrolling down. I usually click the back button before
the page even finishes loading...it's pretty much instant. I look up to the
URL bar, realize where it's taking me, I say something nasty and curse their
mothers, and click the back button. The whole process takes about a second.

Now that you mention it, I seem to recall reading about Google cracking down
on that kind of thing, and sites like Experts Exchange changing in order to
keep their ranking.

So, Google may forgive them, but my hatred diminishes more slowly.

In other words, "may they rot in hell, or at least decline in popularity until
they can't even pay the bills for their servers".

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aquateen
I had to work w/ ASP.NET from 04-07, and ended up on EE once in a while. I
can't complain; never had to pay for an answer, and usually found one more
often than other sites.

This crowd should know how to ignore ads or view the google cache anyway.

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breck
I can't complain either. Scrolling down is slightly annoying, but the answers
on EE are as a rule, much better than other google results.

Stackoverflow is popping up with great results now too.

Can't we be happy to have both and not bash one or the other?

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pbhjpbhj
I used to be a heavy EE user about 5 years ago (IIRC) enough so that I got a
free premium membership for a month. Thing is now i can't even read the
answers I gave to some questions as I'm not a premium member ... unless I UA-
switch to Googlebot of course (that worked last time I was there).

EE always frustrated me, like Launchpad Answers does now, in that people with
no clue how to solve the problem would answer and then no-one else would
bother because someone already answered (Launchpad is far worse for this as
any reply (except "more info needed) marks the question as "answered").

/rant

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dannyr
Do the figures for ExpertSexChange include those people who clicked on it from
Google then went back to searching again after finding out that you need to
pay/login?

If that is the case, ExpertSexChange is in bad shape than what the stat
suggests.

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kqr2
Actually, you have to scroll through a lot of bs, but the answer you are
googling for is at the bottom of the page.

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akronim
Before you get too excited, experts exchange still had +55.27% growth, it's
not like it's dying. There isn't much of a trend to the (absolute) gap between
the two sites.

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pbhjpbhj
say it with me everybody - correlation is not equal to causation

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lutorm
Which causation are you saying is not equal to correlation here? As far as I
can see, there was no hypothetical cause mentioned, only the fact that
stackoverflow is catching up.

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dannyr
Remember to vote down any ExpertSexChange pages in Google.

Hopefully, they would eventually go way down in the search results.

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Nwallins
> vote down ... in Google.

Wait, what? You can vote for/against google search results?

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j_baker
If you log in, you have access to "search wiki" features. But as far as I
know, it just affects the pages that you see.

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rms
Google said when they launched search wiki that "right now" it wouldn't do
anything for anyone else, but you know that Google can't resist using data
they have for too long.

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pbhjpbhj
Because you think Google are stupid enough to use an easily abused metric like
down-votes (alone) to decrease SERP rankings?

Bounce-rate would be a better metric (and again abusable) and they already
have access to that for many sites.

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dpnewman
I actually did a virtual toast when google results started offering the [x]
removal/non-relevant option for the _sole reason_ that I could have a say in
removing e-e results whenever they showed up. How many times I have clicked on
a e-e link and cursed my way to the backspace key? I honestly cannot count. I
don't begrudge a pay business model at all! .. just being honest that as a
busy programmer, knowing that my answer lies somewhere on a free forum, I so
often end up wasting time with a tease of an answer lying behind a CC wall.

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paulgb
Same here. What really bugs me is that Google could have made their users
happier and put this thing to rest _years_ ago if they just gave e-e an
ultimatum, or better yet, dropped them from the index without warning. That's
what they did to other sites, for example:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4685750.stm>

~~~
lucumo
According to that article BMW was breaching Google's guidelines. No such thing
can be said for Experts-Exchange. The simple fact that you don't like Experts-
Exchange should not be any reason for Google to remove the page.

I personally don't mind the EE pages. They tend to have good answers from time
to time. I have a bigger beef with sites like mysqlperformanceblog.com that
frequently get their search result pages indexed. Pointless crap.

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paulgb
EE might not breach the guidelines now, but they used to. I remember having to
switch my user agent to Googlebot to get results.

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jsz0
If there was a way to permanently blacklist experts exchange from my Google
searches I would do it in an instant. As far as I can tell you can only
moderate it down each time you see it which frankly seems to have zero
relevance to your future searches. You'd think after demoting it 50 times
Google would realize I'm not interested but... nope. Seems to always be in my
top 10 searches when trying to solve a problem.

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w1ntermute
If you're using Firefox, you can remove Google search results by URL with the
CustomizeGoogle extension (<http://www.customizegoogle.com/>). Go to the
"Filter" section of its configuration to do so.

It also has many other useful Google tweaks, like removal of text ads and
click tracking.

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jim-greer
Looks like stackoverflow put in Quantcast a few days ago, so you can see their
direct traffic numbers. ~250K daily uniques, which I'd guess puts them easily
above 2 million monthly. Compete numbers suck, as usual.

<http://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com#traffic>

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justlearning
Until a while back(a year?), I recall that if you came across a question on
ExpExch, there would be lots of 'join now' buttons (those blingy types) just
below. But If you go down the page down - about 2 page downs - all the answers
were there to be read. This way, I did find some decent answers once in a
while.

anyway, good riddance.

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seldo
Experts-exchange has an annoying and deceptive business model. Does Stack
Overflow make any money? Is it supposed to?

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edrtfgdr
It breaks even on a very small amount of ads. There are plans to make more
money with a job board and a contractor/client bidding board. They also have
plans for internal enterprise versions for companies. It was recently valued
at $1M during a recent podcast.

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mhp
Jason Calacanis offhandedly, and a bit sarcastically, offered 100k for 10%. I
wouldn't call that a 1M valuation. (I don't dispute that it's _some_
valuation, but your statement is a bit misleading).

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Skeletor
I think his valuation was really low!

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DanielStraight
At least Experts-Exchange has a legal agreement/TOS page. _rolls eyes at
StackOverflow_

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mrbad101
How come nobody has mentioned that if you are coming from google, you just
clicked the "Cached" button on the search results page?

They allow google to cache the entire page, with the answers. No login needed.
I've never checked if a referer thing or not. Don't really care to investigate
since the cache works fine.

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utnick
I've been using Bing for the past week, apparently Experts Exchange looks for
the google referrer and if present shows the solution on the page, otherwise
if you are using Bing or something else you have to register to see the
solution.

Very Annoying. I wish google/bing/yahoo would just ban EE.

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online
I am pretty happy with this news. I am sick of experts-exchange. When u
searched something you got a link of exchange-experts, but technically you got
nothing because u need to login or register or pay or something else to see
the content.

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mivok
The actual values are probably even word for expertsexchange than that. The
traffic to serverfault.com and superuser.com should be added to the above
values also.

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csomar
i'm not against expert-exchange for charging for help, but against listing
their results in Google search, while they are not real results -> Mislead
people!

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heycarsten
Death to Experts Exchange!

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entelarust
thank god is all i have to say

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dunk010
Thank god!

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ilyak
Expert sex change is irrelevant. I can't remember ever finding something
useful there.

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pbhjpbhj
I can remember finding useful stuff there, I even wrote some answers. I don't
use it now (perhaps been thrice in the last year or so) and find better info
elsewhere often. But it still has utility.

Next worthless anecdotal comment please ...

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jv2222
If I was experts-exchange.com I would be shi __ing myself just about now.

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jv2222
shiing = shi - - ing !

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heresy
Awesome.

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chanux
Expert Exchange FTL.

Last time the same phrase above got down voted. This is just another stress
reducer for EE poor fanboys.

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mrinterweb
I block expert-sex-change, I mean expertsexchange.com, I mean experts-
exchange. That site wastes my time. StackOverflow is great.

