Hacker News Reader

Comment by jklio | Hacker News Reader

Are you serious about Quora? I'm going to go with no.[1] With the text blurring and desperate requests for Facebook signin details Quora is basically expertsexchange for SV insiders now.

Given the text blurring is a form of cloaking (showing one thing to the search engine, nothing to people who come in from a search) I think search engines should viciously rank them down too. And I don't care if there is some "easy" way to get around the blur (like the "scroll down" for expertsexchange or whatever it was), it's not obvious and it just pollutes the search results. Get rid of it. That said, as was mentioned elsewhere on HN recently, Stackoverflow needs a place for more meta questions to be moved rather than deleted as you can occasionally get a useful one that isn't just rehashing things we've seen 1000 times.

[1]http://www.quora.com/Programming-Languages/In-laymans-terms-...

View on HN

In Quora's case the text blurring applies both to search engines and users. I've visited the site as the googlebot user agent and it is exactly the same as what non-logged in users see. They also aren't doing any tricks to hide the full response in the HTML.

Also FYI, most major search engines have "secret" IPs from which they crawl websites using normal user agents (ex: Chrome, Firefox, etc). They then compare the results to the results from their main crawlers to detect the type of cloaking you referred to.

> I've visited the site as the googlebot user agent and it is exactly the same as what non-logged in users see

.. except, of course, that the googlebot just reads the HTML. The CSS3 blur only causes problems when you try to read the site visually, via a browser.

> They also aren't doing any tricks to hide the full response in the HTML.

Yes, that's why the googlebot can read it.

I don't know why you're bothering to argue that this isn't cloaking. It most assuredly is.

  cloak
  verb
  conceal, hide, cover, veil, shroud, mask, obscure, cloud

Seems they use pngs now but were blurring in the past http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4333151

I guess I should be clearer. The full responses aren't in the HTML at all. The blur effect is just images. Neither you or google see the full responses

Quora may be blurring things for both googlebot and users but it still does not excuse the fact that they are deliberately obscuring content for non-logged in users. So in this respect, they are no better than expertsexchange except maybe a less unfortunate name.

You're right, it is cloaking. Is Google invested in Quora in any way that might compromise their judgement?

I just when back and checked, it's a png of blurred text so it isn't really cloaking. Google presumably can't see that text but it gets indexed from the question, the first answer and the first words of the other answers though. Either way it's a page that's mostly useless getting indexed. Are the results higher because Google thinks a series of images surrounded by relevant text probably have relevant content? Are the results higher from the days when they didn't blur and got a half decent page rank (all those links still pointing at them)? I think Google recalculates fairly frequently, and I personally haven't seen as much Quora in my searches - but it's hard to escape personalisation see the DuckDuckGo experiment - so maybe they are on the decline. That's another argument against them being a one billion dollar company though.

So it's not cloaking, it's just bad and annoying.

When I click on that link there's a "Close" button next to the sign-in button.

Try scrolling down past the first answer. Subsequent answers have a blur effect applied to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com