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Comment by irahul | Hacker News Reader

> Quora has gone the way of expert-sexchange, showing up in Google search results for interesting questions, but then overlaying/replacing most answers with blur and "sign up to read".

This shit doesn't fly with Google. Delivering different content to Google bot and the user coming through search makes Google looks like a fool, since the user is unable to find the content he searched for. That is why expert-sexchange shows answers at the bottom when Google is your referrer.

If Quora is pulling up this shit, Google will penalize it. I think it's more likely Quora is simply hiding content behind css.

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It looks like what they are doing are obfuscating with CSS.

See for example: http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo...

The answers are in a span with class "blurred_answer", which has css styles: "color: transparent; text-shadow: 0 0 7px #777". Which in effect makes the text completely unreadable to humans.

This is just one step above "color: #fff; background-color: #fff".

Scummy.

I don't see missing or blurred text in your example,

http://www.quora.com/Bayesian-Inference/How-do-Bayesian-algo...

I checked with two different browsers (Opera and Firefox under Windows).

Could this mean that the Quora PR machine is up in full swing trying to undo damage (at least in the case of specific links that people cite)?

Interesting, it's not blurred for me either, although the other day I remember it was.

I tried this in Firefox and Chrome in both normal and Private/Incognito modes.

Did you scroll all the way down? Still blurry here: http://imgur.com/Bbifs (on google chrome)

Although I see in the html source there are some html comments "googleoff". I've never heard of those before.

I guess "googleon"'ing the first answer is enough to get google juice while staying within the letter of rules, it's still really spammy.

(Plus, how does that play with other search engines?)

Yes, you're right, I can see the blurring in certain cases now.

If I go to the link you cited directly it is not blurred.

But I if search for "How do Bayesian algorithms work" in Google, then click the link that Google finds, then it is blurred.

Once you get the blurred Quora page, then even going to the link directly will get you a blurred page. If you delete all the Quora cookies, then it'll be back to being readable (non-blurred).

Interestingly, if you use Google's encrypted service ( https://encrypted.google.com/ ) to search for "How do Bayesian algorithms work", you'll get a non-blurred Quora page.

IIRC, https sites do not send referer, so that makes sense.

https sites sends referers only to other https sites (even crossdomain), but not when navigating from https to http.

I'm pleased -- perhaps -- in that enough Googlers read HN that now maybe this blurring BS will be addressed.

Of course, it will be addressed by another "true name" purveyor. My head hurts.

I can't see those in the HTML, whether I'm logged in or not, but I have used googleoff & googleon in HTML comments before - they're used to control which parts of a page can be ignored when using a Google Search Appliance.

So, if Quora use a GSA (or rack of them) to power their site search, they can ensure parts of the page aren't added to the index of the search. This can be helpful if you want to exclude areas that are repeated a lot in the site but are not helpful if you are searching, like navigation or help panels.

(Quick edit) googleoff/googleon are completely ignored by normal Google, AFAIK it's only used for their Appliance products.

It looks like they've changed it. I added quora to my list of blocked domains in google immediately after noticing the blurred responses... I don't think I'll remove them.

Unreadable to humans with sight. Screen readers don't care! :-)

Matt Cutts does, though. I'm sure he'll look into it, if we ask him. :)

Just do "select all" (CTRL+A) to see all Quora hidden content.

Source: http://nerdr.com/see-quora-answers-without-signing-up/

I just tried, didn't work. (Firefox on a Mac, select all with command-A.)

Presumably I could View Source or something; but hey, there's no shortage of info on the web without the silly hoops.

I know this is not on topic, but I wrote that answer! It's a huge kick to see it on a random HN comment. :D

> This shit doesn't fly with Google.

Not only does this shit fly but Google are doing it on their own websites.

EDIT: I'm guessing you don't believe me. Try clicking on a Google Groups link.

This article has another example: http://www.seobook.com/googles-youtube-caught-cloaking-spam-...

Google repeatedly violates the "guidelines" they try to force on other webmasters.

> Not only does this shit fly but Google are doing it on their own websites.

I am not claiming Google is benevolent. As I mentioned above, if a user searches for "rails select in query" and the user clicks on experts-exchange result summary showing partial answer only to be taken to the page where answers are hidden, the user failed to find something on Google. May be he will blame experts-exchange, but he will blame Google as well.

> EDIT: I'm guessing you don't believe me.

I am guessing you were downvoted. I didn't downvote you. If fact, you can't downvote immediate replies to your post. Since you directly replied to my post, the downvote link doesn't appear for me for your reply.

I just want to point out that search results like Quora or Experts-exchange, are definitely not going away. Some websites might be penalized here and there but I haven't seen any consistent efforts to stop them.

In fact, Google wants even more such results. See First Click Free: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Oh and here are 240 million login-walled pages: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:groups.google.com/grou...

I'd be OK with this if I could click on a search result link and actually read the web page; I wouldn't mind other links on that page leading to a please-sign-up.

The scummy thing here is that you're taken to a web page where the interesting content is hidden on the first page.

> In fact, Google wants even more such results. See First Click Free: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&....

Google wants to index as much content as possible. It's providing incentive to content owners to let Google index it. As pointed out by another commenter, clicking on the search result summary shows that document in full. It's only the subsequent clicks that can be paywalled.

> Oh and here are 240 million login-walled pages: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:groups.google.com/grou....

Is it asking to sign in? I tried in incognito mode and I could read the groups just fine.

> It's only the subsequent clicks that can be paywalled.

I find it annoying when that happens. Also, Google's recommendation is to allow 5 clicks a day and allow everyone with "GoogleBot" in their useragent. I wish the implementation was better.

> Is it asking to sign in? I tried in incognito mode and I could read the groups just fine.

You are right, I cleared my cookies and I stopped getting the login redirection.

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