Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review | Hacker News Reader

Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

experts-exchange.com

126 pointsdolphenstein135 comments

It's impressive to me that when the great minds behind Experts Exchange make their voice known, they talk just like the kind of slimeballs you would expect behind such an operation.

It's shameless. In their shoes, I'd just sit there quietly, take the snub on the chin, keep plying my spammy trade, and have enough introspection to realize that the reason no one wants to talk to me is because I've created one of the shittiest, most user-hostile content abominations in the history of the entire internet.

I guess the dangerous thing about dirtbags is that they have no idea they're dirtbags. My only comfort in all this is the knowledge that Stack Overflow has delivered us from evil.

We should direct those slimeballs to this thread so they can get a dose of reality. Actually... not this thread... a transcript of this thread. We wouldn't want their kind frequenting HN!

I suppose that's where some of the "I found an answer on EE I couldn't find anywhere else" responses come from.

No need to suppose - check out the profile and posting history of each of those commenters and form a conclusion.

(I'm one of those "I found an answer on EE I couldn't find anywhere else" people, and I stand by it)

I had always contemplated the idea of asking questions that already appear on EE on Stack Overflow, simply so that their answers can be expanded upon and eventually overtake EE's results on Google.

No kidding. If they displayed an answer or two I might have even considered joining up. When EE was prevalent in Google Search results, it would always make me upset when one of the results looked promising and then I realized I had clicked an EE link. StackOverflow and its success should be a lesson to EE.

scroll down past all the fake answers, the real answers are shown at the bottom

Just scroll to the bottom. The answers ARE there.

Unfortunately either my scroll wheel breaks or I get RSI in my index finger long before I reach the bottom..

Hit the 'End' key! :)

Middle click scroll is one of the greatest inventions. Some might say the printing press or the wheel, but those pale in comparison.

Or the "End" key.

The end key goes too far for scanning. If I want to quickly scan for something, page down and end are too abrupt.

With middle click scrolling I can go as quickly or slowly as I need to.

Of course, the only time I use middle click on EE is to close the tab if I open it by mistake. :)

Oh, yes, I meant specifically for EE, the end key works great there.

Only when you directly link from Google. If you try to search anything on the site itself? It tries to con you into signing up.

It's easy to find the link via google: search for 'site:experts-exchange.com "<title of question>"'

That's not easy.

You need an automated mouse wheel to scroll till bottom passing all those ads .

Sure, but I'd expect the top results to be BOTH pertinent and user-friendly.

The reason is super simple: Google demanded that if you index content on a page, that content must be freely accessible. You can't index what you don't show. EE made the hack to the layout. It was not always like that. I remember searching google help for ways to block domains (ee) from their results. Apparently that was the only reason anyone wanted to block domains :P

FWIW, surely EE are in it to make profit. They've probably made a lot of money.

You don't make a user hostile site for the hell of it, or because you hate your users. You make a user hostile site to make money. And my guess is EE makes millions.

StackOverflow don't have to worry about profit.

One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is a patented system that requires askers to select their best answer. Most Q&A sites (StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best answer, when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question.

StackOverflow allows for both community voting AND for the original asker to indicate which answer was the best answer. I suppose the only thing it doesn't do is require the asker to select a best answer like EE does apparently.

Also, how in the world did they get this process patented?

I somehow manage to lose more faith in the patent system every day. I thought it was at zero, but somehow it's lower.

Perhaps I should patent my faith system that allows for negative numbers. Seems reasonable...

I store faiths in ints so they roll over to positive and I feel better for a while.

I have a patent on that. Pay up.

(had to get that out of my system. feel better now.)

Stored my bank balance in an int too. You'll have to wait for it to roll over.

how's this for a meta-ironic comment: when I read your first 2 sentences, I immediately thought of a joke that I was going to make along the lines of, "sorry I have a patent on systems allowing you to submit a negative amount of faith in something, pay up or shutup!"

Then I read your last 2 sentences. Too weird! Also goes to show, again, what a joke the patent system is. Multiple people can "independently" come up with the same "innovation", given reasonably similar skills and context.

That's what the `non-obvious' restriction should be good for.

You shouldn't loose faith because of yet another silly example of what can be patented. The main problem is that it can be defended in court to the extent where most people can't take on a wealthy patentholder, no matter how ridiculous the patent.

It seems like 90% of the EE questions I see, the asker has vanished before accepting one of the answers - in those cases this patented system is effectively worthless since I have no idea which answer is best. At least on SO I can still get an idea if some answers are better (or if some are flat-out wrong, as happens).

When the asker disappears (which happens even more at SO) a cleanup crew will come and either accept an answer (but give the experts chance to discuss which) or delete it. At SO it just sits there, with whatever votes and no accept. When the opposite happens, you need to do a bounty at SO which may or may not work (never worked for me). At EE the question is first marked abandoned, attracting experts who subscribe to that zone - if no reaction, a moderator will send out requests to know experts in the zone and re-zone if needed. Works well

http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6064978

IANAL, but it appears that simply having a "question and answer" site doesn't apply to this patent. If you read the patent, it's mostly related to the idea of asking a question costs points and giving the best answer, as chosen by the asker, receives points.

Any variation on this scheme, such as a general moderator or the public via voting choses the best answer, or not having the asker assign points to a question to be received (avoid the economy, still have asker chose best answer) can avoid this patent.

Merely removing one claim would be sufficient to avoid their patent. It gets tricky if you "change" a claim, because then you have to consider the substantiality of that change. For example, moving the "point escrow" of claim 9 would be sufficient to avoid their entire patent, but you'd likely be staring down the barrel of the dirtbag attorney they hire to drag you through the mud in an expensive federal court case, hoping you'll just opt for a licensing agreement. It is what it is.

> when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question.

Additionally, I find this point to hardly be the case. I love that on SO you can look below the answer to see another one with ten times as many votes and I know that's the better answer.

Q: What makes Experts Exchange different from other Q&A sites on the Internet?

A: Most of our nearly 3 million solutions revolve around specific technology questions, and the majority of those have a sense of urgency to them.

Huh? How does this differ from StackOverflow? Other than, of course, that those answers are hidden behind a paywall.

We switched to a premium model to keep out of the Venture Capital business (been there, done that, got the t-shirt). Companies like StackExchange couldn't do it without the VC cookie jar. Where's the model? Huh, Spolsky? (I’m sorry. Did that slip out?)

Maybe he hasn't noticed the ads running on every SO page? Or perhaps he doesn't know anything about how careers.stackoverflow.com's billing works (https://careers.stackoverflow.com/billing/checkoutnew)?

I hate saying things like this because it puts me into a position where it looks like I'm saying too much sooth, but it kind of looks like the EE guys are starting to miss the paradigm shift that's occurred and probably will continue to occur in "long-tailed" question and answer sites.

By the way, if you scroll ALL the way down to the bottom of any question page you do see the best answer. Apparently they bank on the fact most people won't scroll that far and get discouraged by the "paywall" on the top. The Google crawler requires the text to be visible I've heard

Only if your referrer is google.com. If you link from here, for example (e.g. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-Virus...) you really will just see the paywall.

Thanks, I did not know that nuance.

Doesn't this only work if you arrive via google search results?

Ad rev and job postings don't account for much of a rev model unless you're in the Alexa top 20. Although I support SO, I don't think they have a viable long-term business model outside of Spolsky positioning it for acquisition. 30 people in a downtown Manhattan office building will eat through 6.5 million quickly.

Step 1: Steal underpants Step 2: Step 3: Make money

Jees. Talk about sour grapes... If EE wants to know why they weren't picked for the Q&A site pow-wow while StackExchange and Quora were, they should look no further than themselves. Let's take a look at one of their current top answers:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-Virus...

30 day trial?! Subscribe now?! Who do they think they're kidding? Or really: who actually uses this thing? Before the other sites came along, it was merely a nuisance that showed up in your search results, mixed in with something that would actually help. (Interestingly, now the problem is StackExchange content-farms...)

This is exactly the kind of thing that inspired StackOverflow (a fact this post even references!) and it's a key factor in its massive growth and adoption on the part of fed up programmers and sysadmins.

>...Or really: who actually uses this thing? ...

The image I have always had of the userbase of EE is a middle aged vet wearing a vest with a lot of pins and smells of cigarettes who sits in his trailer on The Internet Forums answering computer questions such as "Which is better - a 3 1/2 inch floppy or 5 1/4 inch floppy" and is known to the other folks in the park as "The Computer Guy"

His goto answer for anything being "Well, you're gunna hafta go ahead and reinstall windows, because your monitor driver is out of date which is why you cant change the resolution back to 640x480"

I also imagine them to be the type of person who is still hanging onto that 386 with the bad math co-processor because its still worth something.

No offense, but your imagination is pretty elitist.

Jesus christ relax.

My father, and his father before him, were military veterans in their middle age.

I lived in a trailer park in Iowa when I was a kid.

Not sure why you think those are negative things.

Imagine John Goodman from Lebowski....

Frankly, that was the image I had in my head - I wasn't trying to offend or be negative. Maybe you're sensitive?

isn't being negative exactly what you were trying to do? unless you were trying to conjure up positive images of experts exchange.

My brother is a Lt. General in the airforce, my father was in the airforce as well.

I find it so funny that you, and others on this site take such offense to an image I had in my head.

And of course, if you change the Referer header to http://www.google.com/, you get a different page with the solution at the bottom.

I find myself wondering though - why don't they get punished more for feeding different content to the GoogleBot vs what the normal viewer sees? Isn't it basically cloaking - even though clicking on the link in Google search results will still serve up the solution, a normal, organic link wouldn't?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-googl...

"Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you're in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical."

Google sort of encourages this kind of cloaking. It's called First Click Free.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Of course, I had forgotten...

Google should reconsider their position on this I think.

If Google reconsidered their position on this, a vast archive of subscription-only NYTimes, Financial Times, WSJ, etc. content would suddenly become inaccessible.

I can't count the number of times I've seen an interesting article on Reddit or HN, clicked through, found myself butting up against a paywall, and then just Googled the title and been able to read the whole thing for free. You think that these companies would suddenly put their whole archives online for free if they didn't get a bunch of search traffic for it?

I wish google would put ACM and IEEE's feet to the fire. Their crawler definitely sees full PDFs, and we don't.

Acceptable loss in my opinion.

Maybe Google doesn't want holes appearing in their searches when major sites go behind paywalls (newspapers?).

You do have to feel for them though. The new sites on the block don't have to care about making money. They've got the VC money flowing nicely. So they can just have a free, open, lovely website.

"What do YOU think makes this site different from other Q&A sites?"

Why, at one time, I was one of the highest ranked volunteer 'experts' on the site, having amassed the EE equivalent of a zillion karma, or whatever they're called, and then, literally, the first time I go there to ask a question, they're all of a sudden premium? I literally helped build that site's content, and not only got nothing for it, but I have to pay to see the answers that I populated the site with?

As the site's very first "featured expert" (even gave me a tshirt), I wholly agree.

Atwood talked about exactly this, calling it "digital sharecropping": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-digital-s...

What amazes me about StackOverflow is that Spolky and Atwood figured so much of this out at the start.

I'm not so sure that it's they figured it all out at the start. It's probably more to do with mantra of "Experts Exchange with out the evil" Just figure out what EE did, and then do the exact opposite.

that's overused. "do the exact opposite," that is. superficial understanding without an actual construction.

> Just figure out what EE did, and then do the exact opposite.

Even if that was the mantra, that's figuring it out from the start.

That wasn't the mantra though; EE was only one of the influences.

Watch Joel's tech talk (www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ) - they really did figure a ton of it out at the start. See Joel's tech talk

Experts Exchange is borderline spam, to put it mildly. They hide the answer at the very end of an enormous scroll (of course after they try to sell you via a pop-up). A reasonable user has no clue that the answer is on the page.

When I have made it all the way down, I have received a quality solution perhaps 5 out of 500 times.

Stack Overflow realized there was a quality problem with the existing tech Q&A services and ate their lunches. Ditto for Quora. Hopefully they can keep it up.

I always considered it spam. I wish Google allowed me to globally exclude the domain from my searches. Moreover, given what I could read it didn't look anymore promising or valuable that the various sites that come up, discuss a problem to a dead-end with no resolution (usually posted by a clueless Microsoft "MVP"). No thanks.

... I wish Google allowed me to globally exclude the domain from my searches ...

You may have missed the news about this plugin for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd...

You can if you run Chrome. They just released an extension to do just this.

(someone posted this on HN recently)

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-...

IIRC, there was a time when EE pages didn't provide any answer at all without registration.

To keep their search ranking up, they'd show this hidden content to the Googlebot, but not to unregistered users.

Google cried foul about this, and thus was the long scroll to an answer invented.

EE's web site was never designed around giving the user an answer as quickly as possible. It has always been designed to maximize its tiny paid account conversion rate. That's a spam business model, no "borderline" about it.

They're clearly freaked out about by Stack Exchange. They attacked them for needing a "VC cookie jar," but couldn't actually saying anything bad about their sites.

This was also surreal: "Sites like Quora seem more like Tumblr or other blog-esque formats."

Wait. What?

Many here on HN have only ever seen EE when clicking on it accidentally because of their SEO-fu.

The rise of more modern Q&A sites combined with Google's renewed commitment to punishing automated/weak/content means this must be a challenging time to be EE.

I admit I'm not mad at that.

Honestly, I'm just shocked to see that there's a real person behind the site.

I don't know why, but whenever I stumbled across an EE answer through Google, it's always seemed like a place full of crystallized ancient knowledge.

second that.

They are based in San Luis Obispo, CA, and I have met a few people that work there. It's interesting to hear all of the complaints from people who work there right out of college (Cal Poly is near by). Apparently they are not very nice to their developers and many burn out after a year and quit.

Speaking as a former straight-to-EE-out-of-college employee:

I didn't experience any of the "not very nice"-ness you're referring to- my coworkers there were and are actually really nice folks.

I did, however, leave because of burnout.

Did you get an office, free food, an on-site gym, etc., etc.? If not, then that's what people call "not very nice" these days, at least for programmers.

I didn't get a personal office, but barring a handful of individuals, nobody did. Everyone worked in shared space. No cubes though- just adjoining desks, grouped by department.

Everyone got free snacks and drinks, and free lunches delivered to the office on Fridays. There wasn't an on-site gym, but the company paid for memberships to a local gym. There was also the beginning of a game room with a ping-pong table, a foosball table, and a dartboard.

The perks were by no means Google-scale, but they were nice nonetheless.

I know, right? Those damn programmers are so entitled. Everyone knows the marketing people do all the hard work!

Ok, I'm done sarcasm trolling.

Interesting, I've heard mostly complaints. Good to hear that they aren't all bad.

My last company hired a guy who claimed to be one of the top engineers at EE. Crystallized ancient knowledge is appropriate. Then again the company I was at is still using classic ASP in production, so even that ancient knowledge can at times be a bit useful. I agree with icco, I've heard bad things from friends in town, never checked it out myself.

These guys tried to recruit me out of CalPoly. One of the most disgusting, slimy companies on the internet, and the people behind the site are every bit the sleezeballs you think they are. I believe this blog post adequately supports my assertion.

(Also, who can resist the old internet joke about their original domain name? expert sex change dot com made for good chuckles in Staley's class.)

The sad thing? Staley founded them and still thinks that they are a good company.

From the article: "One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is a patented system that requires askers to select their best answer."

A great example of how broken the patent system is.

I'm pretty sure that's how Yahoo! Answers works as well, no?

and stack overflow...

Stack Overflow doesn't "require" it; it's encouraged, and people tend to look down on you if you don't.

(Enforcement via culture instead of by rules.)

Having said that, given the amount of abandoned questions on EE, I don't think their patent is quite working for them.

This makes me hate Experts Exchange even more.

> At Experts Exchange, we know who we are.

Oh no they don't. Judging by their attitude these people are in complete denial as to how they are perceived by others.

> Experts Exchange Experts are unpaid volunteers who give of their time to answer questions on the site.

Right. So if they are unpaid volunteers wouldn't they rather help the community and provide the same answers at stackoverflow?

If I volunteer to serve soup on Saturday in a soup kitchen to the homeless, why in the world would I want to have some third company take my soup and sell it to the same homeless people and keep the profit.

And then of course, why would they name their site something that sound exactly like "expert sex change"? Wasn't their domain listed as r-rated in some porn filtering software a while back.

I do actually. 9000 answers at EE (since 1998), 2.5K flair at SO (since last year)

1998? I guess if you are just as good, you should have had over 32000 answers then not just 9000 ;-)

Besides who cares to know if hp driver from '98 is compatible with windows Me anymore.

I find this exceptionally funny.

EE held me hostage for so many years, working as a young independent contractor in a small town with far fewer tech resources to draw upon... there's just no sympathy for their particular kind of slimeball tactics.

I remember that they even experimented with cutting off answers right before the end, not to mention saying that they had an answer when it fact they didn't. There was certainly no way to get your money back.

Thanks Google, Hacker News, GitHub, Quora, Ruby on Rails and even Facebook for making my life so much better in less than a decade.

This is the first time I've read anything on that site without having to scroll all the way down.

Hang on, Experts Exchange has actual people behind it? I thought it somehow spontaneously congealed out of the random spam swirling around the Internet, like how the Sargasso Sea forms in the dead zone of the North Atlantic out of the detritus and flotsam there. It's where content goes to die. The notion that some sort of malevolent intelligence fuels it is a disconcerting one.

I think it's more like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Sargasso Sea at least has really cool looking seahorses :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

I have tried very hard to get an interview with ee for Mixergy and got rejected.

Rupert Pupkin, anybody? Experts Exchange is not a small site in general, and has been around for like 15 years (per the article), so I'm a little curious how this guy got so jaded on VC such that he "got the t-shirt."

Is EE really run by movers and shakers riding deals every few years in their spare time? Until finally tiring of the rigamarole and retiring to their first love, Experts Exchange. Isn't it more likely that they've hired various "been through an acquisition and/or IPO" people to try and give them business ideas over the years? No wonder the site is so annoying, these people would have been bleeding the founders dry while suggesting a full campaign of popup ads that worked a peach a few years back at Ask Jeeves. That doesn't work, so they move on to the next guy who totally worked at Twitter in the early days.

I'm thinking lashing out at the world is at the unpaid end of the spectrum of BizDev.

There is also an earlier cry baby article titled "Blekko Bans Experts Exchange....And No One Cares". Too funny!

http://www.experts-exchange.com/blogs/EE-Tech-News/B_3838-Bl...

Possibly the first time I've gone to an EE page and didn't have to scroll down several pages to see content.

"Most Q&A sites (StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best answer, when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question."

I'm not sure that's correct. Didn't the person ask the question in the first place because they didn't know the answer? In the case of a technical question, someone might give them an answer which produces the correct output but in a terrible way, the person who asked the question might be tempted to mark this as the best answer and move on.

::SOB SOB:: looks like someone felt left out. Whoa! no VCs? I would just love to see what would happen if they found out I didn't pick them for my kickball team. Looks like Fortune magazine in the end all for what's right in this universe.

Pretending like you took part in the interview. I can only describe it to my self as...Desperation.

Maybe this is whine your-self some more recognition tactic? I've been out of the game since I was 6 years old, I can't be sure.

I wonder if the author is even aware of the ill will people have towards EE? There are not many sites people clamor to remove from Google listings. You're probably doing something wrong if they are.

I plan on asking quora what "narky" means

Make sure you use a real fake name. Not a fake fake name.

or a Fake name... http://caterina.net/archive/000622.html

When the article didn't load, it took me a minute to remember I'd blacklisted experts exchange in my hosts file several years ago. Apparently I'm still not missing anything.

Experts Exchange was the first site I blocked with the new Chrome plugin from Google. Spam.

I am a registered expert and contributor and they reward me by locking me out if I do not contribute for a month. I cannot even see my own answers. With competition around I do not think they will be able to hold people hostage for long.

What exactly is keeping you there? Sounds a bit Stockholm syndrome to me.

Well you can say that. I am a system admin in my day job and technology area I work is not really hot area in other places.

Switch over to serverfault.com. Less evil!

God I love how Stackoverflow kick those guys buts, and they don't even know their concurrency enough to tell bad things about it, most things they said it's theirs super duper feature is already at Stack.

I think that by "concurrency" you meant "competition." Are you perhaps a German speaker?

It's a little sad that expert sexchange felt the need to respond to an interview they weren't asked for in such an immature manner, and yet they still haven't realized that they weren't invited to the party because their content is paywalled, littered with ads, and generally considered spam by most users who are seeking answers.

As a student, StackOverflow was one of the best thing on the internet. I would be willing to even pay for its content.

There was this time when Google used to let me remove links from the search results (personalization, I presume) and I would RELIGIOUSLY remove expertsexchange.com. It also used to fill me with warmth to know that several other geeks probably did the same! :-)

Wow! I just read something on Expert Exchange and i didn't even have to pay any money!

Expert Exchange is actually a legit company? I had no idea. I don't think i know anybody who's ever used it. Hell, i've never heard of anybody who's ever used Expert Exchange.

>Hell, i've never heard of anybody who's ever used Expert Exchange.

I was an expert there about, oh I don't know, 8 years ago¹ - I got a months free premium account for answering and getting X amount of points in a month. Next time I went back (in common with another commenter here) I couldn't generally access solutions despite having provided some of those solutions myself.

However, I did find that it was, when I joined, the best place to get in depth computing answers. My last question there was in 2009 and I still got a pretty useful answer. I've used it since for a couple of specific searches.

Having looked there once again it still looks like I might get useful answers there.

Sample of questions being asked now:

    16/02/11 	500 	Google Maps to be placed in a MS... 	Tavasan65 	0 	PHP Scripting... 	
    16/02/11 	500 	RHN registration 	AXISHK 	0 	Red Hat Linux 	
    16/02/11 	500 	Multiple domain names, multiple... 	bradpink 	0 	Lotus Domino Email... 	
    16/02/11 	125 	traceroute from Mac (Net Utility... 	squidzink 	0 	Apple Networking 	
    16/02/11 	500 	Oracle SQL query updating the... 	jvera524 	0 	Microsoft Excel... 	
    16/02/11 	250 	Regex to find relative filenames... 	crysallus 	0 	Regular Expressions 	
    16/02/11 	50 	Simple scalar tool 	Tom3333 	0 	Programming... 	
    16/02/11 	500 	Syncing Outlook Notes with iPhone 4 	richeyd 	0 	iPhone 	
    16/02/11 	500 	jquery thickbox tranaparent window ... 	dev09 	0 	JavaScript 	
    16/02/11 	500 	NetApp SAN Choice 	pitchford 	0 	VMware*

Their novel way of using points seemed to work pretty well at eliciting good responses. One of the things I did was to build up a reserve of points when I was volunteering with a computer refurb/education charity in case I had specific questions about some obscure piece of donated hardware. The system seemed to emphasise well that most people could trade knowledge.

StackOverflow started 12 years after Experts Exchange.

---

1 - just looked it up via Google, 2001-06-06 was my join date apparently.

I resisted clicking the link because I thought I would have to sign up for an account.

EE is the only site I would block in my google preferences, a really annoying one...

That was the first site I blocked. I've been wishing for Google Blocklist every time "experts-exchange" came up in a Google search.

It was the first site blocked in our office yesterday when we installed the chrome extension!

"best and brightest technology minds on our site, including over 300 Microsoft MVPs"

That's an odd measurement of what it takes to qualify as one of the "best and brightest technology minds"...

To be fair, I once was an MCP.

I am mostly a coder, but running a small start-up, I encountered a need to configure 3com and HP switches and routers (VLANs, routing, BGP, etc). Those devices have a complex OS, and the documentation is usually cumbersome. To my surprise, the only site where I got exact answers on this was experts-exchange. Google did not help, stackoverflow did not help. I was about to hire an consultant for a few thousand, but discovered that I could do it myself, paying about $30/mo for e-e.

Yes, you are typically the kind of person I help at EE...

What I'd like to know is how does EE always show up so well in Google search results? Even when there are several better results to a particular technical search query EE always shows up near the top of Google's results.

I can't speak for anyone else's queries but from my perspective EE is just Google spam, and their "answers" aren't worth the HTTP traffic.

Amusingly, you have to have a paid subscription to be able to comment on their blog. No wonder it doesn't have any comments.

Trying to load this on my phone and I was greeted with nothing but a pay wall. Snarky indeed.

I went to ExpertSexchange.com and was very disappointed.

I sought out and installed a user-script addon for my favourite browser, specifically to remove EE from search results for technical questions.

EE, I hate you.

EE (ok, and W3Schools) was the main reason I started using Chrome's 'Personal Blocklist' extension. I am loving it.

"I guess the dangerous thing about dirtbags is that they have no idea they're dirtbags."

This needs to be said again.

Seeing their site, I have no trouble believing they've been around since 1986… I mean, 1996.

I was kinda expecting to get hit by a paywall in order to see that post.

Try to comment :)

Go back to spamming Google and stop complaining

Wait, forgot to mention that now that google created the chrome anti-google results plugin, expertsexchange is in trouble (missing hyphen there somewhere)

Whenever I am searching for an internet solution, if I see a result coming from the EE domain I automatically pass over it, so why shouldnt the reporter?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com