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Comment by AndrewO | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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

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.

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.

>...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.

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.

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.

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.

No offense, but your imagination is pretty elitist.

Jesus christ relax.

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