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Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

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Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#81

Post by lobster_johnson »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #78
lobster_johnson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I remember having seen "stack overflow" when I naïvely tried to allocate a 5MB array on the stack in Visual C++ 2010.

Trying this with GCC gives me a segfault (although I had to go higher up to 8 MB).

    #include 

    int main(void) {
      char x[8388608];
      printf("%ld\n", sizeof(x));
      return 0;
    }

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#82

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #81
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember having seen "stack overflow" when I naïvely tried to allocate a 5MB array on the stack in Visual C++ 2010.

Trying this with GCC gives me a segfault (although I had to go higher up to 8 MB). #include int main(void) { char x[8388608]; printf("%ld\n", sizeof(x)); return 0; }

My point was that Visual C++ 2010 gives a different error, but it was running in debug mode.

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#83

Post by lobster_johnson »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #82
lobster_johnson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying this with GCC gives me a segfault (although I had to go higher up to 8 MB). #include int main(void) { char x[8388608]; printf("%ld\n", sizeof(x)); return 0; }

My point was that Visual C++ 2010 gives a different error, but it was running in debug mode.

And my point was that GCC was not as helpful in that case. :-) With the GNU C library you will have to install your own signal handlers and jump through a lot of hoops to get anything more sensible than a "segmentation fault" error. You would think our tools would be a bit more modern by now.

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#84

Post by geargrinder »

Everyone seems to be focusing on the .gov site but if you take a look at the Stack Overflow home page, the page that would normally get indexed highly, there is very little telling Google what it is.

There is no tag in the header. The H1 tag, important to Google, says "Top Questions". The content of the first page constantly changes.

Plus, I would bet that most of the links into Stack Overflow are to individual articles, not the home page. Any particular article probably doesn't outrank a popular .gov site.

This is just very poor SEO on Stack Overflow's part.

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#85

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #83
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that Visual C++ 2010 gives a different error, but it was running in debug mode.

And my point was that GCC was not as helpful in that case. :-) With the GNU C library you will have to install your own signal handlers and jump through a lot of hoops to get anything more sensible than a "segmentation fault" error. You would think our tools would be a bit more modern by now.

Oh by the way, I'm not sure if it was exactly 5MB, it might actually have been 2MB. This particular case was 2 years ago, now.

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#86

Post by Saavedro »

Nursie wrote: post #80
minodude wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a qualitative difference somewhere there. I'd still prefer the river crossing to come top, but recognise that's just me.

In both of these cases you can get google to do what you prefer by typing "define" in front.

"define ford" shows a dictionary definition of ford before all results, "define stack overflow" shows a link to wikipedia before all results.

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#87

Post by ma2rten »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #9

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…

I don't think that a simple algorithm would lead to less poorly ranked search results.

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#88

Post by stormbrew »

geargrinder wrote: post #84

Everyone seems to be focusing on the .gov site but if you take a look at the Stack Overflow home page, the page that would normally get indexed highly, there is very little telling Google what it is. There is no tag in the header. The H1 tag, important to Google, says "Top Questions". The content of the first page constantly changes. Plus, I would bet that most of the links into Stack Overflow are to individual artic…

I disagree it's necessarily poor SEO. They should do everything they can to ensure that pages that answer questions have better pageranks than their largely useless homepage. That's what gives the name stackoverflow power, questions actually getting answered.

Re: Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

#89

Post by geargrinder »

stormbrew wrote: post #88
geargrinder wrote: post #84

Everyone seems to be focusing on the .gov site but if you take a look at the Stack Overflow home page, the page that would normally get indexed highly, there is very little telling Google what it is. There is no tag in the header. The H1 tag, important to Google, says "Top Questions". The content of the first page constantly changes. Plus, I would bet that most of the links into Stack Overflow are to individual artic…

I disagree it's necessarily poor SEO. They should do everything they can to ensure that pages that answer questions have better pageranks than their largely useless homepage. That's what gives the name stackoverflow power, questions actually getting answered.

Certainly the individual questions and answers should rank highly. They do a somewhat better job at SEO on those pages, although there still is no meta description tag, leaving Google to guess what to put on the search results page.

They could do a lot better on those pages too. The real content is buried below lots of javascript and other code. The higher on the page your real content is, the better. They do have pretty good titles and H1 tags on those pages, and the urls are okay, although I would move the name of the article up at least a level. Here is one: /questions/15181744/twitter-number-of-tweets-not-updating-testing-on-local

But the original topic here was a search for "stack overflow" and for that search there could be no better page than the Home page (well, maybe the About page, although if they did their job better they would get one of those results with lots of sub-section links). There was no real attempt to optimize that page for search engines. Optimizing it for the keyword "stack overflow" isn't going to hurt the rank of those question/answer pages.

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