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Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#21

Post by volaski »

JasonPunyon wrote: post #10
volaski wrote: post #6

I don't understand why StackOverflow allows this, yeah creative commons is cool and all but it IS NOT COOL for actual users. I get so annoyed every time i search for something on Google and it leads to an its clone site. It's not like StackOverflow has better search than Google (which is ridiculous). I still have to search on Google if I want quality search result instead of StackOverflow. With more power comes more…

We use that license because it protects the content from us. No matter who comes along to run Stack Overflow in the future, Stack Overflow can't do something like put up a paywall and lock it up. Someone else'll just be able to host a copy.

As an end user, I don't care about that at all. If StackOverflow does something like put up a paywall and lock it up, then it will die off and some other site will arise that will replace it, just like some other sites that came before StackOverflow which put up a paywall and faded away. Also, StackOverflow can always change the policy if they want (which probably won't happen for the reason I mentioned), so the license as an excuse doesn't really make sense to me. Especially when it comes at a cost of horrible user experience. Lastly it doesn't seem like StackOverflow is doing much to improve search on the site itself and that's what makes this even worse. I wouldn't be complaining if I could find more relevant StackOverflow results on StackOverflow than searching on Google. How is it that I can find more relevant results on a generic search engine than the site where the contents came from?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#22

Post by nostrademons »

Osmium wrote: post #17
Animats wrote: post #13

Google doesn't have a good way to establish provenance, and has trouble distinguishing copies from originals. It's a common complaint of blog operators that some bigger blog copied their stuff and got a higher ranking on Google. Google could check when it saw something, but that won't work against fast scrapers. For that, you need trusted timestamps. One solution to this would be to have a few time-stamping services.…

Since establishing provenance is such a big problem for Google, perhaps it might be a good idea for Google to offer a time-stamping service itself?

Google offers this service already:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/fat-pings-for-content-scraper...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub

https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/

Most of the big hosted publishing platforms like WordPress and Blogger already use it, but it's pretty common for sites that built their own codebase not to.

(This was one of my interests at Google, and I had both a 20% project [unreleased] and a real project [Google Authorship] that were devoted to algorithmically detecting copied content and providing reliable attributions. Ultimate though, FatPing/PubSubHubbub [done by another team] was a much more robust way of doing this, with the downside that it's on the webmaster to implement it.)

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#23

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

dsjoerg wrote: post #19
Osmium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since establishing provenance is such a big problem for Google, perhaps it might be a good idea for Google to offer a time-stamping service itself?

It's not directly a problem for Google — it's primarily a problem for sites that create original content.

Not quite. The quality as a search engine could improve dramatically by letting true authors let Google know the content is coming before it's been available anywhere on the web.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#24

Post by what_ever »

dsjoerg wrote: post #19
Osmium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since establishing provenance is such a big problem for Google, perhaps it might be a good idea for Google to offer a time-stamping service itself?

It's not directly a problem for Google — it's primarily a problem for sites that create original content.

Well, I think Google would prefer to send the traffic to StackOverflow instead of it's clone as it's better source?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#25

Post by onion2k »

It's not just StackEnchange. I noticed the other day there's a Twitter account and website called "@explodingAds" that tweets HN user comments and mirrors them on it's website. I imagine taking content verbatim is just a quick way to build a corpus of search indexed pages that generate page views and ad impressions.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#26

Post by fezz »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #8
volaski wrote: post #6

I don't understand why StackOverflow allows this, yeah creative commons is cool and all but it IS NOT COOL for actual users. I get so annoyed every time i search for something on Google and it leads to an its clone site. It's not like StackOverflow has better search than Google (which is ridiculous). I still have to search on Google if I want quality search result instead of StackOverflow. With more power comes more…

Just append your query text with 'site:stackoverflow.com'.

That or use the SO docset in Dash or StackStash https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/stackstash-stackoverflow-off...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7932477

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#27

Post by TD-Linux »

JasonPunyon wrote: post #10
volaski wrote: post #6

I don't understand why StackOverflow allows this, yeah creative commons is cool and all but it IS NOT COOL for actual users. I get so annoyed every time i search for something on Google and it leads to an its clone site. It's not like StackOverflow has better search than Google (which is ridiculous). I still have to search on Google if I want quality search result instead of StackOverflow. With more power comes more…

We use that license because it protects the content from us. No matter who comes along to run Stack Overflow in the future, Stack Overflow can't do something like put up a paywall and lock it up. Someone else'll just be able to host a copy.

Thank you for doing this, by the way.

It'd be nice to figure out the whole Google link ranking thing, but I don't think switching away from Creative Commons is the way.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#28

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

nostrademons wrote: post #22
Osmium wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since establishing provenance is such a big problem for Google, perhaps it might be a good idea for Google to offer a time-stamping service itself?

Google offers this service already: http://www.labnol.org/internet/fat-pings-for-content-scraper... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ Most of the big hosted publishing platforms like WordPress and Blogger already use it, but it's pretty common for sites that built their own codebase not to. (This was one of my interests at Google, and I had both a 20% project [unreleased] an…

Thanks for sharing this. I stand corrected (by a Googler, no less!). I wish Google pushed for greater adoption, then, as it does with Page Speed, SEO advice, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone else noticed Stack Overflow clones in Google search results?

#30

Post by codezero »

Animats wrote: post #13

Google doesn't have a good way to establish provenance, and has trouble distinguishing copies from originals. It's a common complaint of blog operators that some bigger blog copied their stuff and got a higher ranking on Google. Google could check when it saw something, but that won't work against fast scrapers. For that, you need trusted timestamps. One solution to this would be to have a few time-stamping services.…

Isn't part of the core of pagerank that certain domains are more trustworthy than others?

Given that this is supposedly true, wouldn't the same content on stackoverflow out rank a random new domain with the same content

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