Stackoverflow Eating Away at Experts-Exchange
siteanalytics.compete.com
siteanalytics.compete.com
I came across 3 or 4 experts-exchange pages today when looking to fix a small apache issue.
From the front page: "Filter spammy websites from search results"
exactly what I do with Tek-Tips...
After that, you can use g <something> in the address bar to search for something with a sane query.
Greasemonkey (or Opera user javascript as I believe that's mostly compatible) script to remove experts-exchange results from any google query. Saves you from having to use a different search or use -site: stuff.
Should be easily extendable to hide/dim/highlight/whatever any sites you want to see less/more of.
Also, Jeff mentions it in his intro to StackOverflow Coding Horror post (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001101.html):
Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming)
edit: Oh, I was looking on a page that had no answers. Didn't realise that at the time.
If you receive a search result on Google that points to an EE question page, you can see the answers at the end of the page. EE tricks casual visitors into thinking they need an account by putting a long list of things at the top of the page and the real answers all the way at the bottom. This way Google ranks the question/answer but people think they need to buy an account.
Example Google Search (Click 2nd link): http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...
note If you visit the link directly, the real answers disappear. Yet another sneaky EE trick, this time preventing bookmarking/direct linking.
experts-exchange gets most of its traffic from gaming Google. It isn't that useful of a site.
There's nothing in this graph that suggests market share is being taken away.
They were pretty obviously experimenting to find out what kind of annoyance would convince free users to sign up.
I presume there are other programmer websites in the world than stackoverflow and expertsexchange. The miniscule decrease you note can hardly be attributed to stackoverflow, just because stack overflow is the other company on the graph.
It needn't even be competitive forces at play. It could be that expertsexchange got slower and Google fed it less traffic for a while, which is something that might be permanent or transient. Attributing this to anything based on this graph will be a fruitless labor.
No graph can show action ('taken') so as to demonstrate causation. That's why so many arguments are susceptible to "correlation/causation" trouble. As you suggest, there are any number of causes for the data given. To seek proof of causation from a single graph is a flawed venture.
But if we look at whether market share was reduced ('away'), an observation may be made from a single graph. Not to say 'why' or 'how much', but the observation is still valid. If you sell 90 cars last year, and 110 cars this year -- and I sell 5 comparable cars last year and 50 comparable cars this year, I have "taken market share" from you in a generally accepted sense. Within the market space of two, I have more share of our market this year than the previous, even if your sales did not decrease. It doesn't matter how I did it (cause). It may not be true next year (correlation). It may not be universally true -- if there were 500 of this kind of car sold last year, and only 400 cars this year, your share of the total market increased.
My conclusion before, and again: "the mix has steadily changed. If that's not market share loss, what is it?"
If two sites cater to the same clientele, and stackoverflow has gone from zero to some significant fraction, how is that not a market share going from 100% to ~70%? Just because there is no huge decrease in ee doesn't mean they are not losing market share, because all those stackoverflow hits could have been ee.
> There's nothing in this graph that suggests market share is being taken away.
(my emphasis)
The site is still lame though ;)
Now that you mention it, I seem to recall reading about Google cracking down on that kind of thing, and sites like Experts Exchange changing in order to keep their ranking.
So, Google may forgive them, but my hatred diminishes more slowly.
In other words, "may they rot in hell, or at least decline in popularity until they can't even pay the bills for their servers".
This crowd should know how to ignore ads or view the google cache anyway.
Stackoverflow is popping up with great results now too.
Can't we be happy to have both and not bash one or the other?
EE always frustrated me, like Launchpad Answers does now, in that people with no clue how to solve the problem would answer and then no-one else would bother because someone already answered (Launchpad is far worse for this as any reply (except "more info needed) marks the question as "answered").
/rant
If that is the case, ExpertSexChange is in bad shape than what the stat suggests.
Hopefully, they would eventually go way down in the search results.
Wait, what? You can vote for/against google search results?
Bounce-rate would be a better metric (and again abusable) and they already have access to that for many sites.
I personally don't mind the EE pages. They tend to have good answers from time to time. I have a bigger beef with sites like mysqlperformanceblog.com that frequently get their search result pages indexed. Pointless crap.
It also has many other useful Google tweaks, like removal of text ads and click tracking.
anyway, good riddance.
500000 uniques but how many ad clicks? I'd imagine their clicks-per-impression is really low on this sort of site unless the ad is the solution to the problem. People are focussed not aimlessly searching, they're also probably the sector most immunue to ads - computer experts at work.
They allow google to cache the entire page, with the answers. No login needed. I've never checked if a referer thing or not. Don't really care to investigate since the cache works fine.
Very Annoying. I wish google/bing/yahoo would just ban EE.
Next worthless anecdotal comment please ...
Last time the same phrase above got down voted. This is just another stress reducer for EE poor fanboys.