Is Experts Exchange playing fair with search engines?
I often google for error messages, quite often http://www.experts-exchange.com/ comes top of the results. When I follow the link I see the original question, a bunch of adverts and the answers rendered into unreadable text, the text being seemingly random letters and also obscured by the css settings. I suppose I should just sign up.
But thats not what bothers me, the real issue is that text from the answers gets matched by google, but when I follow the link I can't see the very text that google just matched my search on.
Here is an example:
Google turns up the following result
But when I follow the link I don't see the text from the search result anywhere. Instead I get a message about sign up being needed and a bunch of obscured text.
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_22113260.html
I'm not sure why this happens, perhaps the search engine is seeing things it ought not or the site is trying to drive traffic? Either way for now I'm ignoring search results from that site.
But thats not what bothers me, the real issue is that text from the answers gets matched by google, but when I follow the link I can't see the very text that google just matched my search on.
Here is an example:
Google turns up the following result
But when I follow the link I don't see the text from the search result anywhere. Instead I get a message about sign up being needed and a bunch of obscured text.
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_22113260.html
I'm not sure why this happens, perhaps the search engine is seeing things it ought not or the site is trying to drive traffic? Either way for now I'm ignoring search results from that site.
7 Comments:
Try using google's cached page link.. it will lead you to the original page google has crawled and stored.. I've seen it work at times..
Scroll down further on the page. Just when you think you have hit the bottom you get to the text of the solution, and they are un-obscured. It has always been like this.
You can use a firefox user agent plugin to pretend that you are a search engine. The u get to see the content as google sees it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#User_agent_spoofing
You just need to scroll down further on the page. Thats it!
That used to be that case that you could always scroll down, but often, I find EE using JavaScript to obfuscate the answers. I'm not sure if they care about your using agent in this case, since the bots don't run the JavaScript, they'll see the page just fine. I found a greasemonkey script which removes the EE links from your Google search results. It works, but it's not a great solution.
I have to say Experts Exchange is one of the most wrong-headed sites I have come across. I supported it in its early days, but they are relentlessly moving towards commercial exploitation of the information that users have freely contributed, so now I just leave them alone.
I concur with Steve, and as a former EE expert I've moved to www.TheScripts.com like many others that also got dissatisfied the way the new EE site is operating.
Nic;o)
Post a Comment
<< Home