Stack Overflow hit 1,000,000 questions last night

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/millionth-stack-overflow-question/

by bjonathan • 16 years ago

95 44 16 years ago

blog.stackoverflow.com

retube• 16 years ago

Ah dammit. I noticed a couple of days ago the number of questions was at 997k. I meant to keep an eye out and see if I could ping in number 1 million - but then promptly forgot.

robgough• 16 years ago

This is great news, if for no other reason that prowling google for answers is 100%[1] more effective than it used to be, as most searches lead me straight to stackoverflow.

[1] well, 100%-ish. I've not measured this. Nor am I going to.

cdr• 16 years ago

I haven't noticed too much change in Google; I generally just go straight to Stackoverflow first.

markkanof• 16 years ago

There seem to be a number of sites that just poorly mirror content from StackOverflow. They usually have the question and then maybe some answers, but don't usually include comments to answers or even which answer was marked as correct.

It's very frustrating when they come up above StackOverflow in Google searches. I end up slowing down a lot to make sure I don't click on those results. Sure I could just go straight to StackOverflow which I often do, but there are other good sources of programming knowledge on the internet that I want to be able to find too.

These mirror sites are also frustrating because they are blatantly leaching off of the work of both the StackOverflow developers and the StackOverflow community. Kind of makes me wish Google did have a blacklist for these cases.

spolsky2• 16 years ago

When we find out about these cases, we ask them to conform to our creative commons license agreement by linking back to stackoverflow.com, in hopes that ultimately this will teach Google that they are non-canonical and rank them lower than us.

dnos• 16 years ago

Wow, that truly is amazing.

On a funny note: I wonder how many of those questions were answerable by the first result of a simple google search? :P

codeslush• 16 years ago

My experience tells me that they usually are the first search result in google -- and when they aren't, I specifically look for them in the search results because the site is incredibly accurate and useful and I have come to trust it.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

Just as a side note, please make sure to upvote both the question and any helpful answers if you've found the question using Google and it helped you as that's how Stackoverflow dynamics work.

ankimal• 16 years ago

I m mostly always doing 'site:www.stackoverflow.com how do I do XYZ ?' in google ..

rayvega• 16 years ago

To conveniently search all of their stackexchange sites using Google including stackoverflow.com, try the search box on http://stackexchange.com/.

This somewhat helps with a problem they are facing which is fragmentation of questions and answers across their sites. For example, for Ubuntu you might need to search three or four of their sites before finding an answer to an issue you are having.

mhp• 16 years ago

Weird... it used to be on duckduckgo that if a Stack Overflow result was your first result, the answer would actually be displayed as well, but that doesn't seem to be working right now: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Netbeans+Forwarded+over+X11+Font

mahmud• 16 years ago

you can drop the "www." prefix, btw.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

Duck Duck Go makes this a bit easier, just say !so xyz.

eneveu• 16 years ago

Even faster, I've setup "keyword searches" in Firefox (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches). I created the following bookmark:

  Name     : [so] Search StackOverflow     // the "[so]" here is just a mnemonic
  Location : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s
  Keyword  : so

Then, when I want to search for "vim vs emacs" on SO, I open a new tab (Ctrl + T), type "so vim vs emacs", and press enter. This searches "site:stackoverflow.com vim vs emacs" on Google.

I have a similar smart bookmarks setup for HN searches, and you could get more creative if you want (DuckDuckGo search, or even a custom StackExchange search like rayvega mentioned, using "http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s in the location field).

Chrome has something similar: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Sephr• 16 years ago

You can always just search Stack Overflow directly (I consider it to have an adequate search engine), which is easily done in Chrome by typing stackoverflow.com (often only the first two characters), tab, and then your query.

alanl• 16 years ago

My default google query for a programming problem has become.

[keywords] site:stackoverflow.com

And with 1M Q/A it looks like this isn't going to change any time soon!

joshhart• 16 years ago

I actually have trouble contributing to StackOverflow as much as I'd like. The community has gotten so good that most questions with my realm (Scala & Java) seem to be answered within 30 minutes. Since I only look for questions to answer a few times a week, I never find anything.

At least I can get points by asking good questions.

jcnnghm• 16 years ago

Stack Overflow is the ultimate long-tail resource. My favorite example of this is, what I consider to be, a very obscure question I asked then answered about getting (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded...) anti-aliased fonts and sub-pixel rendering working when running java software on a remote X11 server. This sort of thing is incredibly esoteric, yet, close to 1,000 people have looked at it in the last year. When I asked the question, and found the answer, there was no useful information that I could find about it, yet when you search on google today for 'x11 java anti-alias' the first result is my question, and the second is someone elses.

We've come a long way since expertsexchange.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

And now that question would get closed and marked "Belongs on ServerFault" before anyone could answer it.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

Wouldn't it just get moved to ServerFault, and then someone would have answered it, and the Google result would have pointed at ServerFault instead?

codinghorror2• 16 years ago

why would that get moved to serverfault? It's about an IDE. I wouldn't vote to move it to SF.

if anything it is more SuperUser-ish, but it's so developer centric that I don't think any off-topic votes are necessary.

bbk• 16 years ago

its off the topic but i read expertsexchange as expert sex change

Sukotto2• 16 years ago

While it's cool they've had a million questions, I feel more interested in seeing stats on things like:

# non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non)

# questions with an accepted answer

# questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not

RossM2• 16 years ago

This could be done using their data dumps (however I don't have access to SQL Server so I couldn't tell you this).

digitallogic• 16 years ago

The data dumps are in an xml format, you don't need SQL Server to work with the data.

spolsky2• 16 years ago

Just go here and type in your SQL query:

http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

Sukotto2• 16 years ago

Thank you very much for making this data available Joel. This is really interesting stuff.

nopal2• 16 years ago

I think these are right.

# non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non) - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12626/

# questions with an accepted answer - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12627/

# questions forced to community-wiki vs those that were not - Don't know enough about their schema to answer this one. This could be the answer - http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/12635/

bullseye• 16 years ago

>> # non-closed questions (broken out by answered/non)

Are the labels flipped? When AcceptedAnswerId is NULL, wouldn't that indicate a non-answered question?

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

Congrats and thank you for making the web a better place!

mike463• 16 years ago

Bet they'd have more questions and answers without that stupid third-party login crap. (OpenID)

blasdel2• 16 years ago

How many of those are duplicates of existing questions — doesn't heralding growth contradict the original site goal of wiki-edited QA that stays fresh forever?

Stack Overflow hit 1,000,000 questions last night

Related Stories