Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

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

#51

Post by ciupicri »

volaski wrote: post #39
volaski wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lice…

Wow i'm getting downvoted like crazy. I don't think I said anything that's not factual. At least explain why you think I am wrong if you're gonna downvote. To be clear, I love Stackoverflow and I don't know what the world would have been like if it wasn't around, but I do think there are things that are broken and I just mentioned them. Am I supposed to keep quiet because that's how it's been?

> 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

As others have already said that possible thanks to their liberal license, not despite of it, so you're wrong, hence the downvotes (though I haven't voted in any way).

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

#52

Post by nitrogen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #32
sltkr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a timestamping service; that's just a way to quickly notify Google when you add a page to your blog. What if your blog doesn't use Pubsubhubbub, but mine does, and I copy your blog post? Google will see my post first, but that doesn't prove I wrote it, so Google cannot use that to make ranking decisions.

I don't see how pubsubhubbub differs from the originally proposed timestamping service. For any timestamping service, it will still be the case that if you don't use it, and somebody else scrapes you and does use it, their timestamp will be better than yours.

There can be more than one timestamping service.

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

#53

Post by nostrademons »

nitrogen wrote: post #52
thaumasiotes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how pubsubhubbub differs from the originally proposed timestamping service. For any timestamping service, it will still be the case that if you don't use it, and somebody else scrapes you and does use it, their timestamp will be better than yours.

There can be more than one timestamping service.

This is not an advantage.

Imagine a scenario where a rogue timestamping service performs just well enough to get a significant userbase. They then alter their service such that instead of simply returning the timestamp, they put the content up on the Internet, but assign themself an earlier signed timestamp before returning a timestamp to the original requestor. They would instantly replace all of their customers in Google results, because Google would think that they were the originators of the content. They'd then be free to do all sorts of mischief with that influx of traffic: show ads, install malware, phish addresses, etc.

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

#54

Post by Bjartr »

jeffmould wrote: post #34

Sort of related, but in the last year it seems to me that Google's results in general have been increasingly getting worse. Now it seems that at least two or three spam results are always present in the first page of results. Most of these results also happen to be duplicate content of bigger sites though. I have tried reporting on numerous occasions to Google, but just usual "we will investigate" response and never…

In the cases where the information you're looking for doesn't need to be recent (in my case exercises for a particular sport) you can change the date range of your search to e.g. only include results from prior to 2005. Obviously this isn't an option for recent information, but I've found it useful on occasion to filter out blogspam.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

jeffmould wrote: post #34

Sort of related, but in the last year it seems to me that Google's results in general have been increasingly getting worse. Now it seems that at least two or three spam results are always present in the first page of results. Most of these results also happen to be duplicate content of bigger sites though. I have tried reporting on numerous occasions to Google, but just usual "we will investigate" response and never…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by volaski »

ciupicri wrote: post #51
volaski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow i'm getting downvoted like crazy. I don't think I said anything that's not factual. At least explain why you think I am wrong if you're gonna downvote. To be clear, I love Stackoverflow and I don't know what the world would have been like if it wasn't around, but I do think there are things that are broken and I just mentioned them. Am I supposed to keep quiet because that's how it's been?

> 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 As others have already said that possible thanks to their liberal license, not despite of it, so you're wrong, hence the downvotes (though I haven't voted in any way).

As a thought experiment, do you think if StackOverflow changed their license tomorrow (hypothetically because of the spam problem) but assured all its users that they will never mess with them, all users will leave simply because of the license?

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

#57

Post by volaski »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #44
volaski wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lice…

Basically, I'm not willing to supply useful data to a site which then profits off of it without also making it open. So if they weren't open then they wouldn't be getting my answers (or a bunch of other people's).

Before StackOverflow existed sites like ExpertExchange. They are irrelevant now despite the fact that they had tons of content whereas StackOverflow started with 0. People ask questions and answer on StackOverflow not because that's where the most content is, but because that's where most people are. I think license is just a manifestation of the company's philosophy, and personally I don't think I would care much even if StackOverflow changed their license tomorrow BUT kept their philosophy and policy in tact. (Which they should, since they know better than to alienate their users and they've seen what happened to all the sites that alienated their users)

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

#58

Post by aaron695 »

> I would suggest adding a stricter robots.txt or perhaps blocking some of these bots that are scraping your site.

The only people who care about robots.txt are some of the big companies. Even Baidu ignores it (As they can, it's purely there as etiquette)

Blocking bots is hard.

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

#59

Post by inguinalhernia »

Scraper spam exists for virtually every website that is even somewhat popular, there is almost nothing site owners can do about it but rely on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc, to figure out the originator. Google should be able to figure it out and rank the true origin source appropriately, and usually Google is pretty effective at that. But sometimes they're not.

Perhaps what I find ironic is that many of the user "answers" on StackOverflow are basically clone spam themselves, copy/pasted from other websites by some user of the site, usually without sourcing the origin. I have personally found my own unique solutions and code copied verbatim and pasted to answers on the StackExchange network multiple times, outranking my original work without a reference to the origination of course, and I'm sure others have experienced something similar. Perhaps that's what you get with a user generated site, maybe Wikipedia experiences something similar.

Related, some of you may recall a few years back, that StackOverflow basically complained to Google in a public fashion about not ranking well enough and got a boost from them, whereas obviously the average Joe and an average website has no such option nor recourse. Here was the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286

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

#60

Post by ConceptJunkie »

I haven't seen this yet, and I do searches pretty frequently that result in StackOverflow.com hits... and I make a point of choosing them first, because they are usually the best results.

However, a few days ago, I did see a single hit for expertsexchange.com for first time in years, at least that I noticed. Back when Google used to let you blacklist domains from your search results, before StackExchange was ever around, or when it was still very new, I used to block them, and eventually I'd assumed they'd gone away, but maybe not.

I hope StackOverflow and/or Google are able to do something to put the kibbosh on this kind of thing, because despite the complains SO is still a huge and valuable resource.

Post reply on HN