A Chrome extension to avoid the Stack Overflow ripoffs

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gledhololmniapejefjfocffkhoamlll#

by jlangenauer • 16 years ago

126 48 16 years ago

chrome.google.com

spicyj• 16 years ago

How can we prevent these sites from ranking well in the first place?

earl2• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1985714

imperialWicket• 16 years ago

Use http://dukgo.com instead of its less quality-motivated big brothers. If google, et al. see duckduckgo usage spikes, they will likely implement similar filtration measures. Then they will post blog updates about how awesome they are for adding said measures to their service. And I will read about it after searching with duckduckgo.

eru• 16 years ago

Sounds a bite like Opera vs the major browsers.

I use duckduckgo as the default search engine with Chrome, and it works really nice. The key to make switching easy: Preface your query with, like `!g my-query' or `"!bing my-query' to search on Google or Bing. Useful, because for me Google is still better on searching stuff in German.

Just using `! my-query' gives you I'm-feeling-lucky semantics.

Have a look at http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html for an exhaustive list. !hn searches Hacker News via searchyc.com.

gte910h• 16 years ago

THANK GOD. I was getting really pissed off while trying to meet a pretty hard deadline yet trying to lookup iOS esoterica.

Semiapies• 16 years ago

Judging by the permissions, it redirects for a whopping three sites. Why not just not click on the links for those sites?

jlangenauer• 16 years ago

Because, for reasons known to the engineers toiling at Google, and not me, these sites will show in the search results, and the actual StackOverflow answer will not be shown at all.

geekfactor3• 16 years ago

That's been my experience as well. These sites have been a royal PITA and I'm glad to see this extension.

Encosia3• 16 years ago

SEO is non-deterministic enough that I hesitate to even speculate, but the clean markup on sites like eFreedom is probably a lot of their advantage. Stack Overflow buries its content in quite a bit of presentational markup. Everything else being equal, it makes sense that the tighter, more focused page should rank better than the larger, more convoluted page containing the same content.

earl2• 16 years ago

I don't know what the deal is, but it's weird on SO's part. If the issue is, as a sibling comment says, presentation html / js confusing G's crawler, then you email your account manager at Google and it will almost certainly be completely kosher to show the G scraper different material than is displayed, as long as the difference is true to the intent of the searcher. So you can present the G crawler just questions and answers with no javascript and no additional markup.

codinghorror5• 16 years ago

yes, it's very very bizarre and it drives me crazy. We've tried 3 or 4 different things to fix it and nothing seems to take. Note that our attribution terms do require a link back primarily for this reason, and even the sites who attribute back to us totally legally still have this problem. It truly does feel like a Google bug, honestly. See related discussion at http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/5385/page-appe... . I'm all ears if anyone knows of a way to fix this.

duck• 16 years ago

For a little more info on these sites: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/58369/did-anyone-not...

evandavid• 16 years ago

Often times, efreedom ranks higher than StackOverflow, and in some cases SO isn't even on the first page (for some reason the official source 'misses' with my search terms). In those cases, I open up the efreedom link and click through to SO. This seems to be happening more and more.

EDIT: I see that the extension actually redirects to SO. So in a way the presence of those sites when I wouldn't normally see SO results is a good thing. Nice.

ekanes• 16 years ago

>> In those cases, I open up the efreedom link and click through to SO. This seems to be happening more and more.

I completely understand why you're doing that, but you should know that's seen by the Goog as a big +1 for efreedom. All they know is you clicked on that result and didn't come back because it didn't answer your question.

ams6110• 16 years ago

DuckDuckGo does filter some of these sorts of sites. Not sure about these in particular, but I did try searching for "NSFetchedResultsController" there and none of these sites were in the results.

jonpaul• 16 years ago

Actually, I never thought I'd find one, but DuckDuckGo is a search engine that every programmer should use. In fact, I've found that DuckDuckGo can be better than Google in a lot of cases.

cdr• 16 years ago

Google is not currently optimized for technical people - if anything, it's anti-optimized. It shouldn't be hard to beat it for technical queries.

geekfactor3• 16 years ago

Sites like these are, in my opinion, the scourge of the internet. There is a lot of talk nowadays about curated search engines displacing machine-generated search engines but I tend to think this goes too far. A search engine that could reliably determine the authoritative source of duplicated content and only include that source would be killer. Seems within the realm of possible... Anyone working on that?

ryanpetrich• 16 years ago

It shouldn't be difficult to detect. Whichever site receives content first is likely the definitive source.

grogers• 16 years ago

Also, in many cases (eg. this one) the duplicated content even links to the original source, so even simple pagerank should put stackoverflow significantly higher than its duplicates.

Swizec• 16 years ago

Look up information cascades.

We're doing something along a similar vein for LazyReadr. The idea is to merge news about the same story together, an important step from there will be deciding which is the authoritative source to display. Going from that to effective search isn't a large leap.

geekfactor3• 16 years ago

Thanks for the tip. My search turned up this resource, which looks awesome:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986198

_stephan• 16 years ago

I suspect Google isn't doing this for legal reasons. They probably have to take care not to look discriminatory in any way.

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

Google Blacklist can be used to remove any arbitrary site: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hbodbmhopadphblo...

thegyppo• 16 years ago

I really can't get over how a blatantly spammy website (Adsense plastered over pages) just reorganizing SO content can have such a huge traffic velocity - check this alexa chart: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/efreedom.com

AndrewO• 16 years ago

It's sites like these that have made me wish I could downvote or mark-as-spam from the search results. Why can't I tell Google that I never want to see results from certain URLs ever again?

nerfhammer• 16 years ago

You used to be able to do this using the Search Wiki feature

kaylarose• 16 years ago

I would love to see this feature. Preferably as a way for search results to be "voted-down" by multiple users, with an aggregated score (this would probably be heavily gamed/spammed by black hat SEO people, and become useless anyway).

At the very least if I am logged into my gmail account, I should be able to hide certain site from being returned in my personal results.

nhangen• 16 years ago

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to do this for any site you didn't want to see in the search results? Is it already possible with Google personalized?

mkane91301• 16 years ago

Wait, let me see if I understand this right. Stack Overflow doesn't use AdSense. Other sites scrape Stack Overflow and surround the ripped-off content with ads from AdSense. And you're wondering why Google ranks its customers' sites higher than its non-customers'?

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

A correction: these sites don't scrape Stack Overflow's content, they download and use it directly and legitimately. Stack Overflow content is cc-wiki licensed and released in full data dumps every month, as long as the sites link to stackoverflow.com and otherwise comply with the cc-wiki requirements it's legit.

dy• 16 years ago

@codinghorror - any update from your conversation with Matt_Cutts? I'm curious on this issue from a justice standpoint, as continuously seeing efreedom results in the Google rankings just doesn't sit well with me.

I looked around eFreedom's site a bit and they are providing some additional add-on value (translations etc.) so that may also be the case. In any case, best of luck in getting SO pages ranked better.

codinghorror5• 16 years ago

the auto-translations are specifically against Google's TOS, just FYI. Beyond that Matt is looking into some specific oddities we found and stuff was forwarded on to the Google search quality team. Not sure what will come of it, but Matt Cutts is awesome!

Rabbidwongbat• 16 years ago

It looks like the robots.txt on those translation sub domains is disallowing all crawlers.

A Chrome extension to avoid the Stack Overflow ripoffs

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