Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by brianwillis | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

brianwillis

So HN, what sites are we all blocking?

View on HN

My first round includes eHow, Mahalo, Associated Content, Experts Exchange, Squidoo and Examiner.

Update: I added answers.yahoo.com as well, which has consistently terrible content and yet is often highly ranked.

I really often get exactly the answer I need from Yahoo Answers, just to throw that in there...

I have only ever seen incorrect answers on Yahoo Answers, so our experiences definitely vary. That's the beauty of allowing custom blocklists though.

I've found that there are some more taboo (but valid) questions that are only ever answered on Yahoo! Answers, presumably because people aren't worried about their identity there.

For an extreme example: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071113122412AA... (Warning: Taboo. And the answer probably isn't relevant to 95% of the posters here. :)

I found Wikipedia's answer to be of much higher quality (and properly cited).

Experts Exchange used to be a scam, showing fake results. But now, they just roll them to the bottom of the page. I don't endorse them or like them, but they've had decent quality answers several times.

They play too many dirty tricks for my tastes (for example, it's only at the bottom of the page when you come from Google)--I won't give them any of my page views. I have no idea why Google doesn't bust them on what is straight forward cloaking.

Oh, you're right. I agree, any site that displays significantly different content when coming from a Google search should be heavily penalized.

A few more:

http://www.google.com/search?q=hubpages

http://www.google.com/search?q=ezine+articles

http://www.google.com/search?q=all+experts

I added +-hubpages to my keyword search in Firefox. I should probably look into an extension instead, but it works well enough. I like the idea of Google getting lots of searches for <random query> -hubpages

Experts Exchange.

As mentioned above - bytes.com and bigresource.com

Definitely Bigresource if you're doing anything with Flash/Flex.

ehow, experts-exchange, questionhub/efreedom/etc

experts-exchange.com

eHow. They appear to be connected with a spambot that's attacking random wikis. They might not be part of it, but even if not, I won't feel too bad about blocking them.

markmail, osdir. these sites basically mirror yahoo/google groups. Big source of frustration.

markmail provides the best archives of Apache project mailing lists that I've seen. Many of the project sites link to the markmail archive. And it's ad free.

Compare for example the Apache archives of CouchDB (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/) to Markmail archives (http://couchdb.markmail.org/search/?q). The former is searchable; the other isn't.

as replied up the thread...

[I run osdir.com] Just to be clear we're not scraping content nor SEOing to death. We've been running our mailing list archive for almost 8 years.

To quote Matt_Cutts somewhere else in this thread: 'because USENET/mailing lists don't always have a centralized/canonical location on the web, which makes dupe content more of a potential issue. It's not the usual "Website X copied my website" scenario.'

If you dislike us that's cool, but just know we're not showing in your SERPs because of scraping & SEO trickery. A lot of people, maybe not you, really are finding their answer there. There's a lot of solid answers in inboxes.

I see. I bear you no ill will. I just happened to one day start seeing LOTS of osdir and markmail results in my searches. And it's not even that I mind what osdir does (I did find answers there), but that it's UI is worse than the original site and I feel that the originals should be given higher weight.

Hey cellis, thanks. What I see in cases where we come up higher in SERPs is that the crawler just hasn't found the best content in google groups yet, if ever. I scratch my head over that one too, but ours is not to reason why. I don't see the index pointing to the same content in the landing pages typically either with my queries.

UI: LOL, yeah, it's a toss up here whether to make it prettier or keep it a bit old school.

devcomments.com. osdir.com, and mail-archive.com

efreedom, experts exchange, ehow.

Would be interesting to have collective access to what people are blocking.

I like the approach...being able to click and exclude based on the search results that pop up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com