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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

I seem to remember at the time there was about 1/2 year - year where Google loved them and you'd get a Get Satisfaction result for googling "[company name] support". GS were HN darlings for a little bit, then started getting annoying because you'd land on this pointless page, then 37signals (rightfully) publicly called them out, then google seemed to delist them in a panda or something and then everyone forgot about them.

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then google seemed to delist them in a panda

And rightfully so. They were a pest, just like the spam-site by that Calamaris guy from Netscape around the same time.

Lesson learned: If you depend on search traffic then don't be obnoxious. Otherwise nobody will speak up for you when Google snaps your neck.

Hey Google, why is Quora (expert-sexchange 2.0) still polluting my search results anyway?

Could be worse, could be a Yahoo Answers result.

At least you don't have to log in with a social network to see the answers.

I suppose you know that answers are on the bottom of the page. Right?

Here you go. Not super efficient, but a little bookmarklet to get rid of the most annoying things about Quora

javascript:(function(){function a(c){var e=document.getElementsByTagName('*'),i;for(i in e){if((' '+e[i].className+' ').indexOf(' '+c+' ')>-1){e[i].style.display="none";}}}a("modal_signup_background");a("modal_signup_dialog");a("modal_signup_facepile");})();

Easier just to ignore it completely, why should I waste my time on overriding their stupidity? Actually Google seem to be dropping them down the ranks, as I rarely see a Quora link now.

Off topic, but this code blob broke the formatting of the HN comment page, causing text to extend horizontally off the screen. It'd be great if you (or a mod) could add some (4, I think?) spaces in front of your code to make it appear in a code/pre tag.

    Like this.

Yahoo! Answers results are often quite entertaining. I treat it as a comedy site.

Yahoo Answers is nice and not at all spammy. Some of the answers are bad (and some of them are very good), but the site itself is clear and simple, and doesn't have the obnoxious login nonsense of Quora.

i'm glad I'm not the only person who read it as expert sexchange every time

Atwood and Spolsky get a lifetime of karma for stack overflow

I'm a former Get Sat employee (I left about two months ago). While the company may have done that early on, we definitely did NOT continue that at any point when I was there. There were a few communities like that we still kept up because there was some activity, but we certainly weren't adding new ones. In fact, we were actively pruning communities that had no activity and were on the old, free accounts when I left.

In the 2.5 years I was there, the only communities we launched were ones we were paid to launch.

Yeah, but the linked blog post is from 6 years ago. So like 3 years before you joined.

Whenever I ended up on a getsatisfaction page after searching for something I always felt like I had landed on some kind of dodgy crappy aggregator rather than anything official.

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