71–80 of 131 posts
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Maybe people are actually searching for the site, and not the thing that named it?
You'll notice that people search for facebook not "face book" when they go there.
Gotta wonder though: should StackOverflow.com rank high for "stack overflow"? After all, a "stack overflow" isn't necessarily related to programming questions. Yes, you can ask questions on StackOverflow.com about stack overflows, but that's missing the point. So if I have a domain name that's a thing, but my site has very little content related to that thing, should I rank high for queries about that thing?
Segmentation fault: 11
test.rb:2: stack level too deep (SystemStackError)
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded
If you do the same thing in Java:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StackOverflowError
But if do you get that, would you not google "StackOverflowError", as opposed to "stack overflow"?
(Then again, my Google searches are perhaps uncommonly precise. If a function "foobar()" in library "libfoo" overflowed when processing HTTPS URLs, I would probably google for "foobar stack overflow libfoo https url".)
The Wikipedia entry for stack overflow (the concept) is the fourth hit on a search for "stack overflow". Should be acceptable to a newbie.
Note what site shows up as the result and for the links for "similar" and "link to".
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You'll notice that people search for facebook not "face book" when they go there.
Stack Overflow is officially named "Stack Overflow" (with the space)[1], though it's common to refer to it as stackoverflow (no space), of course. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/about
Google's algorithm has gotten so big and so complicated over the years, that there are so many cracks and special cases that can cause sites to disappear from or be poorly ranked in search results, unless you're lucky enough to be huge in the tech scene or post here and get your comment seen by a Googler (as I have on occasion). Any Googlers reading this, I'm looking into rebuttals of false DMCA requests being ignore…
That being said, I do think this specific failure has no reasonable explanation. No matter how I think about it, or look at it, the only explanation I can come up with is essentially: "What percentage of people would need to see a wrong version of a search result before it is reported" or "How long would it take us to fix a knowingly wrong result".
Gotta wonder though: should StackOverflow.com rank high for "stack overflow"? After all, a "stack overflow" isn't necessarily related to programming questions. Yes, you can ask questions on StackOverflow.com about stack overflows, but that's missing the point. So if I have a domain name that's a thing, but my site has very little content related to that thing, should I rank high for queries about that thing?
Would a person struggling with a stack overflow actually google "stack overflow", though? Surely only a very fresh programmer would need to google it, and only if he/she knew what the concept was. But here's what an infinite recursion in a C program prints if I run it: Segmentation fault: 11 Well, that's C for you. If I try Ruby: test.rb:2: stack level too deep (SystemStackError) Ok, still not the same nomenclature.…
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I bet there's some sort of logic on google's side that states, if a government homepage url redirects to another non .gov URL, that the .gov address should be the canonical page of the site thats being redirected too. Which would explain why stackoveflow's homepage isn't listed in the results. Just a guess.
I could imagine the ranking favours .gov domains, which should be reliable. But surely for anything Google sees as a redirect, the redirect target should be the canonical URL?
That would only be the case for a 301 redirect.
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Because it describes what a stack overflow is, rather than being a site named after the thing? That would be my thinking. Ok so maybe wikipedia doesn't have to be the top result, but I'd rather have results relating to the thing I'm searching for come above sites just named after it.
I am willing to bet the City of London against a house-brick that the vast majority of people searching for 'ford' are not looking for a definition of the river crossing, but rather the motor vehicle company named after the man named after several other generations of men named after such a river crossing.