• Kate (unregistered)

    Sorry, only saw one comment when I commented. Post-posting I saw there were other, similar comments. :x

  • Gonegle (unregistered) in reply to Muzer
    Muzer:
    Remy Porter:
    I also don't use Google. DuckDuckGo does a much better job of finding code samples and StackOverflow pages.

    Not in my experience. As much as I've been getting thoroughly irritated with Google recently, there's really not much of an alternative. They do have the best algorithm when it comes down to it. If you think DuckDuckGo has as good or better results, you're kidding yourself (or you consistently search for things that work whereas I consistently search for things that don't ;))

    Google used to be "do no evil" then they were on my watch list for a couple years, then it became apparent that they were tying all my searches to my real-world identity (even though I didn't explicitly give them that).

    Last week Google officially moved from suspicious to black list for me. They decided (wrongly) I'm under age 13 and will need to give them a credit card or driver's license to prove otherwise. No thanks. Bye.

    metacrawler.com FTW. All the former goodness of google plus yahoo and others. And the trackers see the request coming from metacrawler not my IP.

  • Mark (unregistered) in reply to Ben

    That is, in fact, the way I used to view answers until they decided to block that too with JavaScript and html trickery. And Google, if they actually followed their own guidelines, should have promptly purged them from the search results for being deceptive. Experts Exchange have been far to slippery over the years with their answers for me to bother testing whether they'd like to show me useful information this week, with this browser and using this search engine. I don't care; there's plenty of information on useful sites that don't treat their users like shit; and Google should still purge them for breaching their webmaster guidelines (I think the guidelines still cover the case where you hide useful information from users based on referrer, as EE apparently do today)

  • C-Derb (unregistered) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    Has anyone mentioned yet that the answer is there way at the bottom of the page? And that this only works if google is the referer?

    Just want to make sure we have our bases covered...

    I thought for sure we would have covered the bases by the time this comment was made, but here we are, on Page 2 of the comments, with no end in sight....

  • Publius (unregistered) in reply to Kate
    Kate:
    If you scroll to the bottom, the answers are free.

    Anyone care to wager how much longer until the next "scroll to the bottom" post appears? I'm going to put $100 on 17 minutes. Who wants a piece of that action?

  • someone else (unregistered) in reply to Publius
    Publius:
    Kate:
    If you scroll to the bottom, the answers are free.

    Anyone care to wager how much longer until the next "scroll to the bottom" post appears? I'm going to put $100 on 17 minutes. Who wants a piece of that action?

    Never mind that - I just found a hidden link that makes unicorns pop up!

  • kkdTup (unregistered)

    If you scroll to the bottom of the exchange site, youll see the answers for free... though it only works when coming from google.

  • Yakko Warner (unregistered)

    Those props and evars are for Omniture tracking. Apparently it's really informative for analytics-type people, but it's really annoying for developers as we have to reference complicated documents describing exactly which properties and event variables have to be set under exactly which conditions (especially when said documents are written by analytics people that go into details that are irrelevant to development, and leave out details that are critical).

  • (cs) in reply to Publius
    Publius:
    Kate:
    If you scroll to the bottom, the answers are free.

    Anyone care to wager how much longer until the next "scroll to the bottom" post appears? I'm going to put $100 on 17 minutes. Who wants a piece of that action?

    DING DING DING, we have a winnar!

    kkdTup @ 11:56:
    If you scroll to the bottom of the exchange site, youll see the answers for free... though it only works when coming from google.
    Double or nothing?
  • Ken (unregistered) in reply to kkdTup
    kkdTup:
    If you scroll to the bottom of the exchange site, youll see the answers for free... though it only works when coming from google.
    I don't know how to use scroll bars, you insensitive clod!
  • Jason (unregistered)

    The answers are visible when you come from Google because EE follows the First-Click-Free policy. That's why they continue to be indexed.

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to Mark

    That's one of the most ill-informed comments I've ever read here, and worthy of its own WTF...

  • Ben (unregistered) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    Google simply shouldn't index Experts Exchange. It's that useless, doesn't deserve it's prominent ranking on tech queries, and at least for large parts of it's life deliberately obscured content from users that it showed to the Googlebot (a Google no-no and one they should have acted on)

    If you just scroll ALL THE WAY down to the bototm of an experts exchange window you can see the answers...

  • Carl (unregistered)
    // Temporary BTF-Related Popup hacks pending #11541, #8286. // This is necessary until a global popup solution (#8286) can place all popups in the body
    I got your "global popup solution" right here: don't use them. No. Never! They're evil.

    Oh, we're talking about a site that is evil anyway. So never mind.

  • Narpas (unregistered)

    In regards to the featured comment, that google shouldn't even index ExpertsExchange, I realized once I read this article that I haven't seen them in some months, despite googling often for technical answers.

    Google maybe should have acted on it sooner, but it's mostly gone now.

  • neminem (unregistered)

    Yeah, it's funny - I remember when I used to see expertsexchange hits all the time in google results. Occasionally they were actually useful; mostly they weren't. I hadn't even thought about it, but stackoverflow seems to have taken over from them completely not only in the area of usefully answering programming questions (long live the king!), but also in the area of google's algorithm showing their results to me. (Which I suppose is probably mostly because it's what people are actually using to generate new questions and answers. Which is good.)

    p.s. why would anyone ever get to a expertsexchange page -not- from a google search? p.p.s. relevant page: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheProblemWithPenIsland

  • Leonardo Herrera (unregistered)

    I still don't see the WTF on the second code. I see bad style or practices, but no WTF-inducing code.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    Google simply shouldn't index Experts Exchange. It's that useless, doesn't deserve it's prominent ranking on tech queries, and at least for large parts of it's life deliberately obscured content from users that it showed to the Googlebot (a Google no-no and one they should have acted on)

    Every once in a while, they do have a good answer. If they aren't still giving the answers to everyone below the main page body, you can always set your user agent to googlebot to get the answers that way... that was the SOP at a company where I used to work.

  • (cs)

    So where's the FF/Chrome plugin to automatically set google as the reference for any stackoverflow page view? And preferably remove all the bullshit at the top?

    To be fair, the people who'll want to code it will need the site's content - and won't be able to code such a "complex" piece of software.

  • Spewin Coffee (unregistered) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    Google simply shouldn't index Experts Exchange. It's that useless, doesn't deserve it's prominent ranking on tech queries, and at least for large parts of it's life deliberately obscured content from users that it showed to the Googlebot (a Google no-no and one they should have acted on)

    They didn't do that back when they should have because of its usefulness to the tech world. It is also likely that Google engineers relied on them as much as the rest of us did. As a result, no one wanted to be the "bad guy" at Google. Nowadays, Stack Overflow has largely replaced them and search results tend to return hits to SO rather than EE. In fact, today I will usually go and try a different search if EE comes up instead of SO because someone has likely asked the question somewhere on SO with potentially good answers.

  • F (unregistered) in reply to Evo
    Evo:
    So where's the FF/Chrome plugin to automatically set google as the reference for any stackoverflow page view? And preferably remove all the bullshit at the top?

    To be fair, the people who'll want to code it will need the site's content - and won't be able to code such a "complex" piece of software.

    Fair? Why? This is TDWTF - we don't do fair here.

  • Sigivald (unregistered) in reply to Gareth
    Gareth:
    For everyone who thinks the answer is at the bottom of the page on Experts Exchange pages - I bet you clicked through from a Google search.

    Yeah, and?

    I don't know where you are getting to such pages from, but in practice that's how anyone does it, so for almost-all users it's a non-issue.

    That and, "who uses that instead of Stack Overflow anyway?"

    (If you really do need to share one with someone, sure, it's mildly annoying to make them use a Search instead.

    But, big deal.)

  • (cs) in reply to Muzer

    In my experience, Google is better one it can enough backlog to use your old research and choice to get better predictions.

    DuckDuckGo, by design, don't do that, so it's hopelessly worse pretty quickly. But try to search something a bit vague on someone else computer, you will see that google ain't that smart once amnesiac.

  • Markis (unregistered)

    Isn't that anecdote the default Omniture s_code setup?

  • (cs) in reply to Markis
    Markis:
    Isn't that anecdote the default Omniture s_code setup?

    Yes, I guess TRWTF is Omniture doesn't take arrays? I'm pretty sure they considered it and felt that it would cause more problems than solve. A lot of people implementing Omniture tracking don't know JavaScript or even programming that well, so keeping track of the order of parameters in an array would prove too difficult for them. Typically these params are documented in a spreadsheet by the marketing team, so it's easier for them to refer to 'prop23' than to figure out which is the 23rd item in an array.

  • crusy (unregistered)

    Standard Omniture-initialization... wait for the part where propX till propY are filled! That's where the real WTF starts. Welcome to my world.

  • David (unregistered)

    But on embedded machines, lacking a filesystem, I find it easiest to scroll all the way to the bottom, where the answer can be viewed for free.

  • Hugo (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Hey guess what guys, if you scroll to the bottom to read the answer you get the bonus of reading all their junk too! Why wouldn't you visit for that, it's like icing on the ex-spurt, which I think might be why they needed the sex change.
    Not to mention....how many experts will pay to post answers?

    There are hundreds of free sites out there where experts can post answers without paying the privilege.

    I find answers from stackoverflow, bytes (although they were better before they were bytes) and a few others are usually useful.

    I find if I accidentally open a tab from experts-exchange, daniweb and a handful of others I just close the windwo....

  • Jimmy the Greek (unregistered) in reply to Gonegle
    Gonegle:
    Muzer:
    Remy Porter:
    I also don't use Google. DuckDuckGo does a much better job of finding code samples and StackOverflow pages.

    Not in my experience. As much as I've been getting thoroughly irritated with Google recently, there's really not much of an alternative. They do have the best algorithm when it comes down to it. If you think DuckDuckGo has as good or better results, you're kidding yourself (or you consistently search for things that work whereas I consistently search for things that don't ;))

    Google used to be "do no evil" then they were on my watch list for a couple years, then it became apparent that they were tying all my searches to my real-world identity (even though I didn't explicitly give them that).

    Last week Google officially moved from suspicious to black list for me. They decided (wrongly) I'm under age 13 and will need to give them a credit card or driver's license to prove otherwise. No thanks. Bye.

    metacrawler.com FTW. All the former goodness of google plus yahoo and others. And the trackers see the request coming from metacrawler not my IP.

    That's interesting, because I thought (was a long time ago, and I might be confusing it with someit else) was part of go2net which basically became google....

    vivisimo used to be good (they had a nice grouping function to allow you to refine your search easily), but I wouldn't be surprised if they've gone the way of the dodo

  • huan (unregistered) in reply to Jimmy the Greek
    Jimmy the Greek:
    Gonegle:
    Muzer:
    Remy Porter:
    I also don't use Google. DuckDuckGo does a much better job of finding code samples and StackOverflow pages.

    Not in my experience. As much as I've been getting thoroughly irritated with Google recently, there's really not much of an alternative. They do have the best algorithm when it comes down to it. If you think DuckDuckGo has as good or better results, you're kidding yourself (or you consistently search for things that work whereas I consistently search for things that don't ;))

    Google used to be "do no evil" then they were on my watch list for a couple years, then it became apparent that they were tying all my searches to my real-world identity (even though I didn't explicitly give them that).

    Last week Google officially moved from suspicious to black list for me. They decided (wrongly) I'm under age 13 and will need to give them a credit card or driver's license to prove otherwise. No thanks. Bye.

    metacrawler.com FTW. All the former goodness of google plus yahoo and others. And the trackers see the request coming from metacrawler not my IP.

    That's interesting, because I thought (was a long time ago, and I might be confusing it with someit else) was part of go2net which basically became google....

    vivisimo used to be good (they had a nice grouping function to allow you to refine your search easily), but I wouldn't be surprised if they've gone the way of the dodo

    Errr...no. Wikipedia reports metacrawler as being part of infonet, and I can find some references of go2net being acquired by infonet....so it's possible in some incarantation they were both the same thing, but not part of google...

  • (cs)

    1st off: since no one commented on the comments...

    <!-- I like to do it by projecting my screen onto my face, using too much hair product, and playing techno in the background, like in the movies. -->

    If hacking were anything like it is in the movies there's be an effing roller-coaster.

    2nd: Cornify is freaking awesome, inspired by Remy I've created my own chrome bookmark to inject cornify into any non-https site I'm visiting... for my, ahem, kids, of course.

    javascript:void((function(){
	var e=document.createElement('script');
	e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');
	e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8');
	e.setAttribute('src','http://www.cornify.com/js/cornify.js');
	document.body.appendChild(e);
	var a=document.createElement('a');
	a.setAttribute('href', 'javascript:void(cornify_add())');
	a.innerHTML='Cornify';
	a.style.position='fixed';
	a.style.top='5px';
	a.style.left='5px';
	document.body.appendChild(a);
})());

    3rd: I don't care if the answers are at the bottom of expert-sex-change or not, I'm sufficiently insulted by what I see above the fold that I'm not going to sift through that drek for an answer. Chances are it's been answered elsewhere more succinctly. My big takeaway from this run of comments is https://www.google.com/reviews/t; I hadn't bothered to learn that feature exists. I've made use of to eliminate expert-sex-change from my future results, good riddance, I'd rather yell out the window.

    lastly: Omiture was bought out by Adobe, don't expect that code to get better anytime soon. Adobe, TRWTF

  • MeToo (unregistered) in reply to chuBb

    Me Too!!

  • (cs) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    ...I also don't use Google. DuckDuckGo does a much better job of finding code samples and StackOverflow pages
    DuckDuckGo mostly uses Bing, so its results are pretty spotty. Mostly, I use it for its bang notation to directly drive other search engines without having to change which search engine I'm using -- !g for google, !msdn for MSDN, !jquery for finding out why someone's crap jQuery is wrong, etc. If I really want to find something, I !g search.
  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to pakrat
    pakrat:
    I'm sufficiently insulted by what I see above the fold
    What, exactly, is being folded in this situation?
  • Earp (unregistered) in reply to foxyshadis

    OMG, the hassle to remove that 's'.

  • (cs) in reply to Frank

    for your edification: http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/fold.php

    borrowed terminology from the print industry (may it rest in peas); the part of the webpage that is visible when the page loads is 'above the fold'.

  • (cs)

    ExpertsExchange doesn't even medal. It's behind Stack Overflow, Big Resource, specialized sites, etc...these days.

  • (cs) in reply to Mark
    Mark:
    Google simply shouldn't index Experts Exchange. It's that useless, doesn't deserve it's prominent ranking on tech queries, and at least for large parts of it's life deliberately obscured content from users that it showed to the Googlebot (a Google no-no and one they should have acted on)
    My search queries tend to look like this: some error code_2153 -expertsexchange -theothersitethatwantsmymoney ... I think the "-" is my favorite google modifier.
  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to pakrat
    pakrat:
    for your edification: http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/fold.php

    borrowed terminology from the print industry (may it rest in peas); the part of the webpage that is visible when the page loads is 'above the fold'.

    Aaaaaand from that page:
    The table below list the first-fold dimensions, in pixels, for popular web browsers

    Barf! Puke! Murderous rage!!!

    If you're counting pixels you're doing it wrong!

    You're also probably a dinosaur whose mind hasn't made it past the print media era when you had total control of the appearance.

    You don't have control on the web!

    You don't.

    No, you don't.

    No matter how badly you crave it, you don't.

    As just one trivial example, what if the user doesn't have their browser window maximized?

    Take your print media brain and soak it in bleach. Until you understand that the web is not a newspaper, it is not a magazine, it is not a catalog, it is not a TV, and it most assuredly is not a movie, you should not be allowed anywhere near the production cycle of a web site.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Quina
    Quina:
    Take the URL for the page that your answer is at the bottom of, copy it into a fresh tab (i.e. with no Referer header) and viola! No more answer!
    Cello! You're right!
    All your bass are belong to us!

    Meanwhile I viewed source and looked for comments on the comments, but there weren't any. Deception! But that's OK, no one reads the comments anyway.

  • (cs)

    If you're using Google Chrome, get the Personal Blocklist extension and block experts-exchange. It immediately removes it from all search results for you -- and if enough people block a site ("enough", in Google's worldview, being about two-point-seven metric craploads, since it would be too easy to astroturf a competitor into oblivion otherwise) it pushes it way down the list for everybody (and can actually result in complete de-indexing). Now, experts-exchange isn't quite a Mahalo or an eHow (which are/were essentially autogenerated content farms), but they are guilty of unethical practices other than the (formerly) hidden answers (there were, for a while, quite a number of answers credited to me there that were actually posted elsewhere).

    (Oh, yeah--the answers at the bottom deal is relatively new, too. They were hidden altogether for quite a while until Google threatened to de-index. Big sticks work well.)

  • Craig (unregistered)

    While amusing for the sake of the article, the web site's actual URL is experts-exchange.com. expertsexchange.com is a parked domain.

  • Fred (unregistered)

    I view the answers all the time without an account. All you have to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and the answers will be under the adds. An important condidtion is that I was using google to get to expertexchange.

    One of my Profs told me about this, don't remember why it works (google cached page?).

  • JoeNotCharles (unregistered) in reply to Mark

    Just scroll down to the very bottom, past all the ads. The answers are in the clear there. They just rely on people assuming the page is over when the ads begin and a "subscribe to see the answer" popup obscures part of it, and not actually scrolling any further.

  • John (unregistered)

    I'll bet $10 all of you are too dumb to realise that you could just scroll right down to the bottom to work out how much a sex-change costs....

  • (cs)

    Watching all these expertsexchange users scroll to the bottom without reading anything in between so they can tell us all how clever it is to scroll to the bottom without reading anything in between is making me laugh.

  • (cs) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    ExpertsExchange doesn't even medal. It's behind Stack Overflow, Big Resource, specialized sites, etc...these days.

    Please don't use noun as verb. Very confusing for non-native English speaker like NAgesh.

    kthxbai

  • (cs) in reply to Craig
    Craig:
    While amusing for the sake of the article, the web site's actual URL is experts-exchange.com. expertsexchange.com is a parked domain.

    this is what happen, when you don't read all comment and open your mouth to make one.

  • Geoff (unregistered) in reply to pjt33
    pjt33:
    Abico:
    Hilarious capitalization aside, you realize the site is in fact experts "hyphen" exchange.com.
    It is now. They learnt from their mistake.
    I see that Pen Island (http://www.penisland.net/) still hasn't learned that lesson!
  • chris (unregistered) in reply to pakrat
    pakrat:

    lastly: Omiture was bought out by Adobe, don't expect that code to get better anytime soon. Adobe, TRWTF

    I actually find Adobe software quite reliable and informative - when my PC at home locks up for 5 minutes, I can take it as read that one of their updates has just come through.

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