
Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results - babuskov
Finding answers to basically any question is now behind a walled garden that requires that you create an account.<p>This is the exact thing expertsexchange did before StackOverflow came and ate their lunch.<p>What do you think about it?
======
ghostcluster
They should definitely drop Pinterest from Google Image Search results.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Quora and Pinterest are the worst parts of Google results. Also Google Images
has been ruined. Used to be you could View Image and get the source image but
now Google images hijacks that too. I gotta say I hate whoever decided that
was ok. Do what I mean. Actually come to think of it I think this was due to
copyright infringement case against Google. Stupid.

~~~
faitswulff
IIRC this was due to a lost court case:

> Almost two years ago, Getty Images filed antitrust charges against Google in
> the EU, taking issue with the company's image scraping techniques to display
> image search results. Earlier this week, Google and Getty Images announced a
> partnership and Getty withdrew its charges against Google. Changes like the
> removal of direct image links were apparently part of the agreement.

Source: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-
after...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-
removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/)

Meanwhile, the browser feature right click -> "View Image" still works for me
on Firefox, as a replacement.

~~~
jandrese
That only gets you the scaled down preview image. I have a Firefox extension
that restores the "view original" button.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Q&A is the new spam.

Quora is full of it, and so is LinkedIn.

A shill asks "a question," followed by all these "answers," recommending a
particular site, product or technique (that has a backer).

I have had to leave quite a number of forums, because they became completely
taken over by Asian spammers; doing exactly this. They rendered the groups
useless.

TBH: I did fall for it the first time I encountered it. It's a fairly
effective technique, if done right.

~~~
abhiminator
Cannot agree more.

Though I'll say this -- it's hard to optimize Quora's feed, but once you do
that by carefully curating the topics and the people to follow, Quora can be
an incredible source of super insightful answers on niche topics. But it does
take a lot of work, which is a barrier to many.

Their feed display mechanism needs a lot of work imo.

~~~
bonoboTP
Strange because I find that it's full of day-0 beginner questions and little
of in-depth niche, thought out ones.

Like "Where do I start with machine learning?" often with bad spelling, or "Do
you need to be very smart to become a programmer?" etc. By contrast, Reddit,
the StackExchange sites and HN are a totally different league.

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
I used to love browsing Quora, and found a lot of answers fascinating.
However, in the past year something seems to have changed. Now I get really
spammy suggestions, and there is rarely new content on my feed. I get the same
suggestions for days.

I don’t doubt that the good content is there. I think their algorithms just
changed and now I don’t see it anymore. Not willing to put in the effort to
figure out how to get an interesting feed again.

------
manigandham
Quora back in 2011 was magical. I spent hours reading answers by some
incredible people and it influenced a lot of my thinking back then.
Unfortunately they kept raising money they didn't need and the VC treadmill
turned the site into a wasteland.

There are still gems of knowledge but the experience is ruined. Overbearing
content moderation won't let you edit your own question. Credits system was
removed and instead Quora now pays people to post useless questions. They
ignored every tool and feature that writers asked for. The mobile site won't
let you read more than half an answer before forcing the app. Spammers are
never stopped and voting rings have taken over most popular questions.

It's a sad case of a site that's successful despite the execution, not because
of it.

~~~
alteria
I had the same experience.

When I was in high school, there was a group of "Quorans" (including a few
"prominent" ones) that used to hangout on G+/hangouts, and I used to stop by
from time to time. Back then I was very STEM focused, so it was pretty cool to
have conversations with peers that had a variety of academic interests.

Unfortunately, Quora has changed significantly since then, and for the worse.
The only interesting thing is how it has turned into an Indian social network
of sorts, and the associated subculture in that community.

------
nullc
Quora is only one of many garbage domains that clutter google results.
Pinterest is another big one.

Google needs a "block this domain from my search results"\-- they even had it,
for a brief period of a few months a number of years ago. (maybe only for some
users?)

~~~
hftf
I entirely agree.

Quora and Pinterest are particularly routine spam sites in my search results.

They rank just below word reference site spam, like dictionaries, thesauruses,
or translation dictionaries (sites which I do benefit occasionally from), and
below Wikipedia mirrors (which I feel has become so bad that I can't even get
legitimate results talking about the problem itself! Try searching something
like: _search results spam wikipedia mirror "revolvy" "wikiwand"_).

But for me, the worst (and most obvious!) offenders by far are "pronunciation
guide" spam sites. Just a few examples:

    
    
      howtopronounce.com
      howtopronounce.co.in
      pronouncekiwi.com
      pronouncenames.com
      pronunciationof.com
      rightpronunciation.com
    

plus the scourge of 16-second YouTube videos on channels with names like
Pronunciation Guide or Emma Saying.

(If you search for something like _" Deidesheimer pronunciation"_ or _"
pronounce Canynge"_ on Google, the vast majority of results will be those spam
sites, plus maybe an ancient forum thread from 2004 that veered off topic
before anyone even tried to give a serious yet uninformed answer.)

These ad-infested spam sites purport to teach you how to pronounce an
unfamiliar name or tricky word (an important and underappreciated service that
many people use!). But usually they merely contain computer-generated
bullshit, as if fed directly into all available text-to-speech algorithms.
Even the ostensibly human-generated recordings and sites are often flagrantly
wrong, unsourced, and untrustworthy.

There are a few legitimate sites (such as Forvo, Youglish, etc.), but too
often they are woefully incomplete (by nature of their being crowdsourced).
Forvo even contributes to the spam with "do you know how to pronounce this
word?" false positives.

I once blocked all of the spam sites when the domain-blocking feature you
mentioned was built into Google Search; then had to do it once again when I
needed a browser add-on to replace the removed feature (which naturally only
worked on desktop); and recently I was astonished to find that the add-on also
stopped working! The spam never ends.

~~~
raphlinus
I know, right? How hard would it be for someone to make a wiki-style site with
UGC, a reputation system (I speak this language natively and vouch / do not
vouch for this content), a tracker for trending words, fun articles for
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and the like? The Web I used to know seems to be gone or
at least in steep decline, supplanted by garbage like this.

------
c3534l
Quora answers are astonishingly bad. People with fake credentials saying
nonsensical things. I really hope people realize how bad it is, but I suspect
that because its something people inherently don't know the answer to, they
don't understand just how bad it is. Most people stop looking after they get
their answer. Most people aren't going to keep looking after they've found
their answer to find a primary, reliable source.

------
lucb1e
I find Quora through DDG (not sure why this is specifically about Google), but
regardless, 1/3 times the result is valuable. Quora often shows up when the
other results look unreliable or ad farms - not that Quora's replies are so
accurate, but about 1/3 seem okay.

Loading a few pages from browsing history, I don't see any walled garden.

LinkedIn results on the other hand... Google/DDG clearly didn't index the
login page, so LinkedIn apparently shows certain content to the crawler that
they aren't showing to the user, trying to get ranked higher for that query
than the login page would be. Not sure how that isn't seen as fraudulent from
the search engine's perspective.

~~~
joegahona
My experience is the same. When I do get Quora, I do not have to sign up, and
it’s usually valuable. I would add that the presence of a Quora result at the
top of search-engine results usually indicates that my query is freaking
arcane and specific, and Google is doing its best to show me _something_. In
other words, it’s not as though Quora results are taking slots away from
better results.

~~~
lucb1e
> usually indicates that my query is freaking arcane and specific

Exactly this. (That's what I meant with "Quora often shows up when the other
results look unreliable or ad farms", but I didn't phrase that quite right.)

------
RivieraKid
I remember thinking that Quora was really good, I thought that Hacker News and
Quora were two sites with the highest quality user-generated content on the
internet.

At the beginning the core demographics was Sillicon Valley startup scene. It
felt like a small community of smart and interesting people (my favourites
were Yishan Wong and Rory Young). At one point, the site got very popular in
India for whatever reason and there was an influx of low quality answers. I
left some time after that. There was also a trend of people using the site to
promote their products, which was explicitly allowed by Quora AFAIK.

Right now, it seems that the site is _much_ more popular in countries like
India or Nepal than in the US:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=quora](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=quora)

~~~
lonesword
I am from India, and I remember the time when Quora got famous. I remember
reading some quality content on the platform. Then "the masses" started
answering questions just to rack up upvotes (or whatever Quora was calling
it). Imagine Instagram, but instead of uploading pictures of yourself you
copy-paste someone else's content in an attempt to answer a question you do
not know much about.

~~~
iteratorloopmap
And all those 'IIT' Q/A tho

------
MadafakinBATMAN
Quora is the dumbest shit ever. They send out these readers digest emails with
interesting questions and shit and when you click on them they take you the
freaking homepage every time. Like wtf is even the point of sending me the
email than if you're gonna make it incredible difficult for me to find that
particular question that i really need answered now?!

~~~
universenz
As a non-US based user, I uninstalled Amazon's iOS app yesterday because of
this exact behaviour. Often a US-only deal will get posted on a local forum
here in New Zealand. The link for the deal will go to the Amazon US store. If
you click that link without the app, you are taken straight to the listing
where you can review the price, shipping options etc.

However, if you have the iOS app installed, it opens the app when you click
the link, loops twice (never loads the listing) and lands you on the Amazon US
homepage. I've tried everything to stop this behaviour (changing regions,
loading in logged out state etc), but to no avail.

It finally frustrated me so much yesterday (especially in the lead up to black
friday) that I outright deleted the app to stop those links being captured by
the native application.

It feels so liberating to click a link and get the desired result.

~~~
efitz
Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but nowhere near the team that builds the iOS
app.

My experience as a user of the Amazon iOS app is that the developers deeply
care about these kinds of quality issues. I have seen the looping behavior
before in other contexts; I reported it, and it was eventually fixed.

In the app there is a customer service link in the hamburger menu, with a
“contact us” option if you’re willing to spend a couple of minutes telling
them about your problem.

------
thanhhaimai
Anything that requires the user to login to see the search result should
automatically takes a big hit in search ranking.

\- Quora

\- Instagram

\- Pinterest

\- LinkedIn

Just to name a few. In fact, I don't remember the last time I clicked on those
links because my brain automatically filtered them out already. But they are
still spam and should be pushed to page 2 or 3.

~~~
flyinghamster
Add Red Hat Access to that list as well. Nothing like searching for something
relating to Wildfly or CentOS and getting results that require a paid-up Red
Hat account.

------
galkk
Everything is spammy today...

Like I was trying to find lyrics for a song today, and first 5 sites were
showing author and song name, but the page said "we don't have lyrics now, you
could be the one who will write them"

LinkedIn, who straight asks you to log in or create account

~~~
notelonmusk
LinkedIn used to be good. Now it's full of senseless notification spam and
ads. Edit: And fake connection requests.

~~~
mcv
LinkedIn has never been good. It's always been a snakepit of dark patterns.
But I will believe that they've become even worse now.

(I'm still on LinkedIn, because many recruiters find me there and send work my
way. But I barely use it. They do.)

------
crazygringo
Look, as a _website_ yes Quora sucks (and so does Pinterest, mentioned many
times here in the comments).

But individual _answers_ on Quora (and images on Pinterest) may very well be
the only place what I'm looking for exists.

So the _last_ thing I want is for Google to stop indexing and showing their
content.

Seriously -- there's zero user benefit to hiding it. It's easy to identify
Quora/Pinterest in search results and choose to click or not based on your own
preferences.

And at least with Quora, I never have to log in to view all the answers if I
come from Google. It only asks me to log in when I try to click through to a
second question.

Finally, the last thing I want is Google de-ranking results that are behind
any kind of login and/or paywall. Because that would mean de-ranking most news
sites I use, which would be a _terrible_ direction to move in.

~~~
godDLL
> the last thing I want is Google de-ranking results that are behind any kind
> of login

I'm of the opposite opinion. And can't really see your side of the argument.
Care to elaborate?

------
elcaminocomplex
I feel the same way about Bloomberg, and am consistently surprised by the
number of Bloomberg links posted here on HN because clicking through any of
them results in “Sorry, but you read your free article, time to pay up!”

Forbes is also effectively full of opinion hit pieces of low value (although
these don’t seem to be paywalled). These also show up in a lot of Google
searches and likewise get up-voted here quite a bit.

The question is, should google actively try to trim this content, and if so
where should it end?

------
bluejekyll
I don’t know. Google is a search engine for web content. I don’t think it
should discriminate based on the content being freely available or not.

Adding a feature for an end user to say restrict a search in some manner might
be nice, but the point, at least in my opinion, of a web search engine is to
find any and all matching content on the web. If some of that is paid or
otherwise blocked content it’s still doing its job properly.

~~~
fbelzile
I agree with your point, but as a user, I would want Google to rank results
lower if the content served to the Googlebot isn't the same as the content
served to the general public.

I'd expect this behavior to be a red flag in Google's ranking algorithm. Don't
drop Quora, but just let them slide below the fold on results.

~~~
jobigoud
This behavior is known as "cloaking", and it is in direct violation of
Google’s Guidelines.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtnfOgp65Q&t=431s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHtnfOgp65Q&t=431s)

~~~
jorams
It may be in the guidelines somewhere, but if they actually cared at all,
LinkedIn and Pinterest would have disappeared from all search results years
ago.

------
jlg23
How about: Google should let allow users to blacklist sites in the search
results.

But I definitely don't want to live in a society in which someone else who
just happens to be vocal enough can even start a debate that company X should
block company Y from their search results.

~~~
ralphm
Google Search used to have such a feature. I used it to blacklist w3schools.
Of course, the feature is no longer there.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
What's wrong with w3schools? I occasionally find their site useful for basic
HTML stuff and it seems inoffensive enough, certainly compared to others
mentioned here (Quora, LinkedIn, Pinterest et al)

~~~
hk__2
w3schools _used to_ be a very bad resource but it has improved over the years.
See [https://www.w3fools.com/](https://www.w3fools.com/).

------
user_50123890
Not only that, but the answers on Quora seem to be 80% garbage.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Add on top of that the websites that just repost StackOverflow content.

~~~
notadoc
I think you have it backwards. Tons of "content" on StackOverflow is
copy/pasted from another source, often some experts personal blog or a niche
site, without sourcing to the original.

~~~
lucb1e
I've rarely noticed that. Are you saying someone will copy both the question
and the answer from a place like experts exchange or a blog? Do they post them
under different accounts to make it seem less obvious? Or do you mean the
semi-rare occasion where someone cites a blog post?

I think I've seen an unsourced copy only once, I think it was a new answer
where nobody else had seen it yet and I edited in a link to the source. But
this is many years ago, I don't remember the situation exactly (and I visit
stackexchange sites a lot, more than most people I think, since it's the only
social site where I permit myself to go to during work hours).

------
kj_foss
Tip: Short term hack: If you do wish to cross the walled garden for a
particular quora page, simply add a '?' at the end of that particular link,
and then you will be able to view the page. Rinse and repeat every time you
want to quickly glance at the posts.

Long term: Use uBlock origin.

Edit: This is for viewing non-tech posts in general. For anything tech, we
have other pretty good sites.

------
bastawhiz
Quora used to have a system which rewarded good answers. Now, they pay people
to ask popular questions. In the private Top Writers group (I left shortly
after this change) it was predicted that this is result in a dearth of garbage
questions: template "what is X times Y?", nonsense "what if" questions, etc.
And sure enough, it came to pass.

Quora made a conscious choice to trade quality answers for more questions (of
any quality). They surely saw in advance what the site would become and did it
anyway. It used to be a place where you could read thoughtful replies from
intelligent people, and it's become a spiritual successor to Yahoo Answers.

~~~
manigandham
Agreed, writers are what make the site and Quora has routinely ignored their
requests and warnings. I'm constantly surprised at how inept their decisions
are considering the team behind it.

------
FeistyOtter
Google does not need to drop Quora from its search results, Quora itself is
already on the way to irrelevancy. It used to be a place for thought provoking
questions and answers, nowadays it just contains a copy pasted text from the
first google search result. A perfect example of a niche but strong product
ditching its target audience in order to pursue popularity.

------
forgotpwd16
Though Quora can be useful requiring an account whereas the full text is
freely crawled (cloaking) is against Google's guidelines[1] and as mentioned
in their help page violating the guidelines is a reason for the site not to be
shown. Based on that, what should definitely be banned is Pinterest which goes
against half the guidelines.

[1]:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en)

------
isoprophlex
I agree completely... sort of on the same topic: It used to be _really_ bad
with Pinterest infecting image search. Same problem, almost all hits directing
to the Pinterest walled garden. It appears to me that this has gotten better
recently, but I don't really know why.

~~~
tomrod
I may be wrong, it I think they made the name of the source more prominent in
the preview, and also made cutting and pasting the full quality image
straightforward. Just my thoughts, no way to validate.

------
kuon
There is very little signal on quora, mostly noise, the UI is confusing and it
pollutes results, so I cannot agree more.

But there are many more websites that should be "removed", instagram,
pinterest (basically everything that requires a log-in). Also, all reposts
should be removed, there are so many sites reposting SO or mailing list
content with weird UI.

------
idrock
I think Quora is such total garbage info and unfounded opinion I just add them
to pihole blacklist.

Quora actually points to a flaw of algo only search engine rankings - do a lot
of people link to it? Is it a lot of keyword intense content? Yep and Yep!

But the important - is it actually useful, relevant information - well that's
secondary.

------
vbezhenar
I agree. If website presents one content to Google and another to anonymous
user, it's scam. Actually Google is known to punish that behaviour and ban
those websites. Probably Quora is considered too big to fail.

------
arnaudsm
We really need a feature to block websites from Google search. It's impartial
and a common thing on Twitter/Facebook/YouTube.

If a Google search engineer reads this, please think about it.

~~~
zelly
They used to have this feature and removed it. Unlikely they'll bring it back.

------
blhack
I’ve expressed this before, but: just disable JavaScript. Your browsing
experience is improved drastically. You can still whitelist a few scripts that
you need if you want to.

~~~
trolololooo
solid advice, really.

------
jariel
It's mind boggling that the 'world's greatest search engine' does not have a
series of advanced features that let's us really alter our searches in a
consistently customized way.

The 'advanced search' section does allow for some things, but it's a little
awkward, moreover, 'the things we want' are not on there!

The ability to drop sites - or at least discount them (i.e. quora, pointerest)

The ability to turn off Google's extrapolated information, such as the
definitions that appear.

The ability to tag/highlight result from some sites (i.e. put a pin on some
sites, say Wikipedia)

The ability to prefer some words over others in the weighting

The ability to actually _require_ some words (I find it amazing that top
results often don't have a key search term - I understand why that makes sense
in some scenarios, but for most others _I typed the term because I want it_ )

Etc. etc..

There are a ton of other features that would be useful, I'm surprised they
haven't moved into this niche.

I feel that Google is no longer 'search' it's just 'find'. We type it as a
means to 'get to that thing' and we just click on one of the first results.

------
simplecto
I wanted to like quora. I tried to engage there and contribute to raise my
professional profile and, yes, pitch my side projects as parts of answers when
relevant.

That experiment has run its course, and my hypothesis was proven incorrect. I
thought it would help, but it was more like shouting into the void.

There is a lot of astroturfed questions, vague questions, and questions that
seem as if they were automated.

So, I've moved on.

~~~
scarface74
_I wanted to like quora. I tried to engage there and contribute to raise my
professional profile and, yes, pitch my side projects as parts of answers when
relevant._

Why wouldn’t that be considered “astroturfing”?

~~~
simplecto
I always thought astroturfing was answering your own question, or asking
questions that directly referenced the product or service you were affiliated
with.

------
ozzmotik
I personally disagree. While it is absolutely true that there is a lot of
garbage content on Quora, it is certainly one of my favorite sites on the web
because for all the garbage you come across, you can come across some
wonderful gems and actual helpful people, and in general I find it pretty easy
to just mentally filter the garbage out. That might be because I have spent a
lot of time trawling through it and answering questions though.

And perhaps I just like quora so much because it's the only place on the web
I've gotten any meaningful amount of impressions and engagement on content
I've produced (aka answers), so perhaps I am sonewhat biased due to that. All
that being said, I can certainly see why someone might find it annoying, but I
think that if you take the time to engage with it and understand the ecosystem
within it, it'll make it a lot more tolerable.

Or you can likely just follow what I assume will be a suggestion from other
users here as to how to filter quora results out of your queries :)

------
scarface74
Google should also drop Medium for the same reason.

~~~
forgotpwd16
>You've completed your member preview for this month, but when you sign up for
a free Medium account, you get one more story.

Why people even post there?

------
dreamcompiler
There are a number of sites that are mostly useless in Google results. Perhaps
a larger issue is that any company that solicits public data input be required
to sign an ironclad agreement with _me_ that my content is under my copyright
and if they ever try to monetize my content they share any revenues with me.
Otherwise they get class-action sued into oblivion.

~~~
dmurray
The legal situation is rosier than you think. What you demand is already the
case: content you create is copyrighted by you and can't be relicensed by
anyone else without your permission. All without any agreements at all!

Now, it would be tyrannical not to give you any way to transfer rights to your
creative output. So some publishers do allow you to agree to a Terms And
Conditions waiving certain of these rights, or transferring them to said
publishers. It goes without saying that no one would ever compel you to agree
to such conditions, but some publishers might not agree to publish your work
without such an agreement.

------
thawaway1837
I agree but they should only lower the reputation. Most of the answers are
obnoxiously misleading and others are basically spam.

------
threatofrain
But why wouldn't Google's secret ML sauce gradually learn the right dose of
Quora vs Wikipedia to give to the public? That seems more principled (data-
driven) than doing a blanket ban on Quora based on gut-level (possibly
correct) intuition of search experience.

------
bdcravens
I'm torn. A lot of my searches are filled with Quora spam, but I also have
found some extremely deep, well written answers on esoteric topics there. (To
be fair, I think most of those are discovered in targeted emails they send,
not Google searches)

------
ravenstine
I'm not sure I'd support that, but before they drop Quora they should consider
dropping Answers.com. I don't think any reasonable person would argue that
site isn't a complete waste of space.

~~~
freehunter
Somehow I still occasionally get Experts Exchange popping up in my Google
results. I didn't realize they even still existed.

~~~
lucb1e
Me too, it popped up like last week and was the only result I could find (I
already moved from DDG to Google because the results were irrelevant with any
keyword combination I could make) and the answer was, like on stackoverflow,
some "accepted" kind of answer (so marked by the person who asked the
question). All posts were readable except that one: for the marked-as-answer
post, you had to pay.

They've certainly moved on from scrolling down to see the answer...

------
hankinsoft
I tried to report a competitor for vote manipulation last month. They have ~20
answers that have the same ~10 users upvoting every answer (and no other
answers). In response, they closed my answers ️.

------
drusepth
Small tip for anyone that doesn't have a Quora account:

Appending ?share=1 to the end of any Quora URL will remove any signup walls
you see. You can even automate with a quick Greasemonkey script for all Quora
URLs.

------
unixsheikh
In the beginning I kept going back to Google because the results on duckduckgo
just wasn't as good, but it slowly improved, so much that I actually haven't
used Google for search for about two years now. Even local searches for my
country has become much better on duckduckgo.

And when I have occasionally tested Google to compare results, I also noticed
a rapid decline in the relevant results at Google. So much that I can hardly
recognize that search engine any longer.

------
Zekio
I think google should add a search filter option instead that is by default
ignore paywalled/login requiring results, or not ignore them by default, but
if the top answer is paywalled/login requiring show an option to do the same
search without paywalled/login requiring results

~~~
ravenstine
Google already has a browser extension for filtering search results, but you
have to configure your own blacklist. It would be cool if there were an
extension that was like that but more advanced; I'm thinking the uBlock Origin
for filtering search results that could work for both Google and DuckDuckGo
based on premade block lists.

EDIT: It looks like Google took down their extension. _boo they suck_

~~~
CharlesW
A suitable replacement? "Personal Blocklist (not by Google)":
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-
blocklist...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot-
by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg?hl=en)

------
sm4rk0
I'm frequently clearing cookies (not manually) and have no problem reading
Quora answers. I also find a lot of useful results there.

Just for a test I searched for "how an atomic clock works" on DuckDuckGo and
found this nice answer on 9th place (below few HSW and YT results):
[https://www.quora.com/How-does-an-atomic-clock-
work](https://www.quora.com/How-does-an-atomic-clock-work)

------
userbinator
Personally I'd rather they not remove any search results, because I can scroll
past or use "-site:quora.com" if I don't want to see those specific ones.
Google's search results have already gotten bad enough as it is without them
doing any more "algorithmic censoring", if they modify their algorithms to
exclude/derank Quora they risk removing even more possibly better results too.

------
jaclaz
>is now behind a walled garden that requires that you create an account

I am not sure I get it.

If you land on quora from google you can read the question and answer (whether
either make sense is another issue).

If you click (while being on quora) on another question listed, then it
prompts you for "Continuing" and logging via google or facebook.

You can still type a question mark at the end of the address in the browser
address and hit ENTER, the linked to page will load fine.

------
aaron695
The quality of answers in Quora is ok. As good as all the Stacks that are not
computer related for instance. We do need better but no one has worked out how
yet.

So your point is it's a walled garden, but then so are many news sites, so
would you block them as well?

I'm not also sure it's walled, I can access the articles fine atm. But I do
know they did wall it many years ago so not sure if it's changed or something
else.

------
musicale
Search results consisting of links to inaccessible content aren't very useful.

HN posts of inaccessible and/or paywalled content also aren't very useful.

------
hirundo
Instead of "Google should drop X", Google should allow users to weight domains
in search results from zero to some-large-number, and to easily share lists of
those weights. E.g. let the SPLC curate a list, the NRA curates another list,
etc.

Meta-weights would also be useful, users could subscribe to the SPLC list but
weight it by 1.5, weight the NRA list by -1, etc., whatever works for you.

------
buboard
Incidentally , what is wrong with google's crawler/indexer? Using their search
console, I'm seeing thousands of pages of original content which are crawled,
but not included in the index for no apparent reason (no explanation). In fact
the number of indexed pages keeps going down and down very fast. Is this some
fresh evil i m not aware?

------
rs23296008n1
As much as I've come to dislike pinterest and quora I'd not be happy with
google dropping either from results. There are plenty of other "reasons" that
will "accidentally" creep in as acceptable later.

The potential for even more scope creep is real.

That said, various controls to let me exclude my definition of "junk results"
are still a good idea.

------
rakibtg
Quora is more like ask.com's old q&a site where they basically scrape yahoo
answers for new questions and filter them. The difference is that quora has
real people/voluntiar who is technically writing answers of those yahoo
answers questions for quora and old ask.com used to use dumb serp results.
They are printing money now

------
deftturtle
Absolutely. Notice how Gabriel Weinberg is spamming his DDG search-engine.
Nothing against DDG, but this is a shady tactic for promoting your business.

[https://www.quora.com/profile/Gabriel-
Weinberg](https://www.quora.com/profile/Gabriel-Weinberg)

------
baby
Quora tried to grow too fast by generating questions and spamming these to
users for them to fill as fast as possible. A pile of garbage growing too fast
is going to get caught and punished. I can totally see it being delisted by
google and shutting down as a failed experiment that ran its course.

------
lonesword
The worst is when you expect Google to display a stack overflow question or a
Github issue in response to your query, but instead what you get is a Quora
answer. You already know that though the question matches (almost) your exact
query, the answer is going to be badly formatted and useless.

------
trolololooo
Yelp, too, if you are using an iPhone without the Yelp app installed, you
can't see any of the content.

------
crsv
Also there’s the issue of many of Quora’s answers being generated by sales and
marketing content purveyors. The platform has been reduced to useless
marketing content as is mostly devoid of quality answers. Just like content
marketing killed blogs, it’s claimed Quora as a victim as well.

------
dvtrn
I thought this is what the -site: operator was supposed to exist for?

Could that perhaps be a solution client/user side?

~~~
lucb1e
Yes, but adding a list of sites to remove to every single query you ever
type... search engines should just remove bad sites (note: I am actually
_against_ removing Quora, this is just about the general case). Also, there is
a maximum input length for some reason, so that might not actually work.

("For some reason" \-- to prevent monster queries of course, but I mean,
removing sites doesn't cost much computational power at all. With some literal
quotes and AND/OR operators you can create short queries on which it basically
times out after 5 seconds and only returns a few dozen results that it found
so far, and when you reload the page, there are suddenly a lot more results.
So it shouldn't be limiting input length but complexity, which it already does
by timing out.)

~~~
dvtrn
_Also, there is a maximum input length for some reason, so that might not
actually work._

I actually didn’t know that. My first thought was a browser add on that allows
the user to blacklist domains they’d rather not see results and construct a
query based upon.

Seems like that moot if a sufficiently long list would result in sites being
left off and end up in queries anyway.

Thanks

------
osrec
I agree they should drop quora results, but for a different reason. My reason
is that the quality of info is ridiculously poor. Most answers read like
covert adverts for some app or another. It's got to a point where it's not
even that discreet anymore.

------
ned7
If a website didn't require an account initially it should not require it
years after it's founded, that's just nonsense and it will drive people away
to other alternative websites giving the same service without requiring
registration.

~~~
slig
Unfortunately that's not the case. They plaster us with nag screens and
content hidden behind logins because it works. Most people don't care, and the
company gets another profile to spam and track.

------
nojvek
In a way they are a violation of Google’s policies right? They serve different
content to google bot and human.

May be adblockers should pretend to be the googlebot so they don’t get
discriminated.

Oh that would create a whirlpool of cascading effects.

------
Porthos9K
I think Quora and all other social silos should get the Internet Death
Penalty.

------
bishalb
Quora used to be great back in the day, it still is good for sometimes I find
many gems there. But these days there are a lot of BS answers on quora which
are akin to YouTube comments section.

~~~
techsin101
on youtube at least nobody is pretending to be an expert

------
sillysaurusx
I am surprised to see so much negativity towards Quora. I wonder if this is a
case of Quora being so massive that this post is rallying the vocal minority,
which seems large only because everyone happy with Quora is staying silent.

Personally, I get a lot of value from Quora answers. There have been specific
cases where the knowledge I needed was only found on Quora. For example, how
to access Library Genesis when their main domain was down. Another interesting
one was “What’s the net worth of Sam Altman?” The answers seemed pretty
reasonable, and I like that speculative questions are allowed.

I don’t remember creating a Quora account, but even if I haven’t, I think
creating one is an ok price to pay. It keeps the site running.

------
craftoman
I have found interesting and enlightening articles on Quora but most of them
are garbage, the analogy is weird compared to stack overflow. I don't know
what went wrong with this site.

------
skittleson
Agreed. The answers always seem like cliff notes. Just enough to point me to
other resources. Also, that expertsexchange drove me crazy... we gave in as a
company to buy a subscription.

------
nathan929
Absolutely not...sure it's spammy. So use an extension for a personal
blocklist by all means, but as a Quora user I like having answers readily
available. Don't make your lack of creativity Google's job to fix.

/grump over

Seriously though, I know this'll be unpopular but Google already tracks User
Experience Signals to identify sites whose answers are difficult to get to. If
Quora should be identified & ranked lower, that's totally a Google problem,
but dropping entire companies & making it Google's role to monitor sites &
decide which logins are "walled" and which are just UX is a terrible idea (do
you trust Google to get it right every time?).

------
julius_set
Unrelated but i read ExpertsExchange as

Expert Sex Change the way you wrote it out.

------
Beltiras
The questions on Quora are also really low. I'm absolutely done with answering
questions that amount to doing an undergrads homework or how to learn language
X in Y time.

------
seddin
Well they should really do something since Quora now seems to be used mainly
for people to gain some extra SEO points by placing links to their websites in
the answers.

------
meerita
I'm using DuckDuckGo since a year and a half and I'm getting nice results,
including old content and less spammy websites like Pinterest or other places.

------
jquery
I like Quora results, I find them useful. Of course, I’m not loathe to
actually register for these useful sites so I don’t see the pop ups people
complain about.

------
nickpeterson
Can someone reuse Google search results and apply custom filters on top? In
essence, can I add custom desirable features on top of Google search?

------
kull
Yes, I have not really ever found any satisfying answer on quota.

Wondering, wow many upvotes a post like this needs to get attention from
somebody from google?

------
mirimir
If you're lucky, you may get a good answer. Which you can read without an
account. But you can't see other stuff using links.

------
bor100003
I don't visit Quora more than once a month. The feed is full of irrelevant
answers with bullet lists about celebreties.

------
x__x
What about all the link here on HN that link to websites like the New York
Times that block content if your in incognito mode

------
gonzodbg
Why doesn’t every site just dupe me into divulging more of my data and spam me
with ads. That’s how I likes my internet.

------
curiousgal
They didn't do anything about Pinterest, the worst offender to ever exist, so
I don't see anything happening.

------
throwawaysea
I don’t think it is unfair for people to monetize their content. They may do
so either by charging a subscription fee or by requiring people to register,
but they need a way to get traffic to them. Isn’t a search engine the top of
the funnel for that purpose? And if so isn’t it appropriate that these results
continue to be listed? Would we treat Quora or Pinterest (the typically named
offenders) differently from journalistic outlets

------
paulie_a
Quara has quality information but it's never the info you actually want. I
mentally skip over those links now.

------
robertheadley
Maybe it would be easier and better if we just removed the walled gardens from
Quora and Pinterest and their ilk.

------
aembleton
Add the following rule to uBlock Origin

    
    
      www.google.com##.g:has-text(https://www.quora.com)

------
pojzon
You can use "-site:quora.com" for searches to exclude quora. Google search has
pretty intuitive api.

------
sdiq
I have never followed a Facebook link from Whatsapp because of this.
Ironically,same parent company.

------
juped
Search results shouldn't be editorialized. (This is not an endorsement of
Quora, which sucks)

------
bishalb
This is true for medium.com articles as well which get on top positions an
Google consistently.

------
adipandas
This is just hitting the nerve of Quora. :D

May be, there may be some answers which can really be helpful.

------
dano
While we're at it, I'd ask to remove TripAdvisor results as well.

------
wenbin
And LinkedIn as well...

~~~
aendruk
It never shows content to me. I don't understand why it continues to be
returned in search results. Every link is broken.

------
chrshawkes
The web used to be fun and unpredictable. It feels like Google has become a
tasteless bland search engine serving up the highest bidders these days. The
known authorities on any given subject. It's not difficult for small niche
websites to be buried by ever expanding domain authorities. Google is killing
small internet business for sure. Quora is garbage. I'm also tired of clicking
on 5 news articles to finally find one not buried behind a paywall. Google
needs more competition. Most of the results should be date based, first to the
market regarding whatever, should be more of an authority. Instead, we have
niche websites swallowed up by established brands. It's BS. I need to give
DuckDuckGo more consideration.

------
etherio
You can just reload the page to escape that walled garden

------
diego
They might as well drop NYT, WSJ, The Economist. Whenever I see those sites at
the top of the results I don't bother clicking because they are just paywalls.
This month somehow I was "out of free articles" for all of them since the
beginning of the month.

------
rishiraj8824
And of course Medium

------
bananamerica
I frequently get good results from Google/Quora.

------
madiathomas
All I want is a button that allows me to block a website from appearing on my
search results. They can keep it for others. I know I don’t want articles from
Quora, Pinterest, and paywalled news sites when I am searching for something
on Google.

------
mean_gene_1976
Same thing with medium and Facebook. Me no likey.

------
QuiXotical1
Ha, ha. I read that as “expert sex change” lol

------
code-is-code
Same for LinkedIn

------
WTTT
sometimes I just need personal advice and experience instead of long content
with ads in the end, so Quora is ok for me.

------
stevenicr
speaking of head scratching results...

Past couple of years I have wondered how 'chat iw dot us' has been a top
result for 'sex chat' search, and they run google ads this whole time.

that one and 'the porn dude' in those results, which doesn't have a chat
system - they way the algo is working in those. Of course I am a bit biased,
it's sad to me that little content wins in that vertical - lots of content is
penalized for something.

~~~
stevenicr
I'd love to know what the downvote was for on this one. One of the side
effects of the ymyl stuff added to the algo soup is that small sites with
little content can crush larger sites with much more info.

It's terribly obvious in that vertical. I'm sure that was part of the goal,
however what may be good for the spam team is not necessarily what is best for
the users who are searching for particular things.

------
fouc
What's Google? Use DuckDuckGo instead.

------
ykevinator
Can you emulate googles crawler to trick your way around paywalls?

~~~
rednixion
Setting a Googlebot UA will work for any low tech filter, besides looking at
the ASN of the source IP or the javascript engine behavior I'm not sure what
else sites could really do to figure it out sans coordinating with Google to
define the indexer source(browsing/click pattern maybe).

There's bound to be at least one googler in this thread and since the ASN
check would be the hardest to fake and easiest to setup... someone go change
their UA and go to nytimes or something from the office and see if it
works(bonus points for any SRE who does it from a data center).

------
joecool1029
Related, but I used to use a Bypass Quora extension in Firefox (which just
tacked on something like ?share=1, so quora nag screen doesn't hit you), but
switched to another extension. It gets me past the vast majority of paywalls
and nag screens: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

------
notadoc
Quora reminds me of Yahoo Answers

~~~
lucb1e
Indeed, both contain both garbage and useful results. Much like the rest of
the internet.

------
b3b0p
Quora, Pinterest, and Instagram have been mentioned already, but I'd like to
throw another one in this bucket: Amazon

~~~
joegahona
And all paywall sites. Combine this with the ability to hide all paid ads in
search too (the flat-out ads that look more and more like results as the years
go by), and there’s something I’d pay for. Maybe they could bundle it in with
my YouTubeRed subscription? Hmmm...

------
medymed
From image search they should also drop images that link to an academic
paywall (e.g. Elsevier) where the image is not even shown. So painful.

------
pcvarmint
You can block cookies from quora.com, or, equivalently, open in a "private
window", to avoid the paywall.

It's similar to news sites which block you after 3 visits -- clear your
cookies and you can go back to them.

Some sites have anti-anti-tracking technology, and you must enable cookies
and/or JavaScript to even view one page, but Quora isn't one of them (yet).

------
efitz
Yes, Google should exclude or at least visually distinguish all paywall and
loginwall content.

I also want a law that requires cancel/close buttons to be obvious,
accessible, large (of at least a minimum pixel size) and highly contrasting
from the content that it’s on. This would solve a lot of the pop up login
dialogs on web pages that do not actually require login.

------
tus88
You realize Google has a official program that will surface paywalled news
sites in search results, knowing the user will not be able to see the linked
results?

[https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/programs/](https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/programs/)

------
abvdasker
The few answers on Quota which aren't completely bogus are usually out of
date.

------
wnevets
or at-least bring back the personal block list

------
echan00
Completely agree

------
Digg_mov
Noting

------
lggdn
Same thing with paywalled news. I wish Google would remove "walled content" by
default.

------
JupiterToMars
Medium has to be downgraded, it's become total rubbish behind a paywall.

------
probinso
and NY times?

------
burtonator
I was reading about the paywall that Pinterest put up and they did an A/B test
and apparently people DO sign up when forced for the paywall... it's amazingly
annoying though.

------
probinso
and medium

------
vincecrtersknee
drop quora from the internet entirely

------
idonotknowwhy
Not sure if it's been posted, but you simply append this to the url to avoid
the paywall: ?share=1

------
Akababa
You can teach them to do it yourself by bouncing back from Quora and going to
another result. Perhaps it'll also encourage Quora to remove their paywall
from search engine referrers, as many news sites have done.

~~~
ravenstine
> You can teach them to do it yourself by bouncing back from Quora and going
> to another result.

Isn't that what a lot of us are already doing? Quora used to actually be OK,
but it's been total trash for the last few years and I can't think of a single
time I've found a good answer through that site.

Maybe Google doesn't deindex them because it will seem anti-competitive? After
all, they've publicly stated that they're more interested in providing
"answers" than being a search engine.

------
cududa
Pinterest results come up in google images and you need an account to see
them? Newspaper articles have paywalls? Don’t see the difference

------
buboard
google needs some competition. I think , instead of breaking up google, they
should break up Bing away from MS.

------
burtonator
"expertsexchange"... I can't be the only one who read that as "expert sex
change"

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
This coming from HN that posts 1000 NY Times articles a day.

~~~
supernikita
I hate it equally. What good is knowledge if you cannot reach it. Google
organizes something that is useless to me. And I will not enter the social
media circus.

