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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Can you give me some concrete search terms that have this ranking discrepancy? I want to investigate and just haven't seen it yet myself.

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Something has changed here. Aging or a ranking tweak or Phase Of The Moon, something. A search from a couple of days ago is now returning SO above EF, where that wasn't the case a few days ago.

Ah, here's one from the search history with EF above SO:

retaincount instruments

There are several eFreedom hits from the first page, and SO has one hit on page 2 and one hit on page 3.

I have screenshots of the first three pages.

Thanks for giving a concrete example. I'd gotten a couple examples when talking to Jeff Atwood earlier and passed that on to the appropriate team, but more concrete examples always help when we're trying to rank the sites in the best order.

By the way, if people want to mention more examples of other sites outranking Stack Overflow by replying here, I'll try to circle back to check for them, then use them to poke the relevant team to make sure we're doing everything we can.

Here's the only example I have: http://www.google.com/search?q=facebox+value+text&hl=en

Based on my search history I've clicked efreedom links several times, but currently the stackoverflow link is the top one for those searches now. I would be surprised if I had clicked efreedom if stackoverflow was at top.

Heh I get this spammy piece of crap at #1 for that search:

http://pinoytech.org/question/1699545/unable-to-get-value-fr...

I personally would prefer a way to just blacklist sites like this. It's very easy to visually spot a "cloner", and once I found such a site I don't care to see it again. I know this feature has been requested by many others; just adding one more voice to the pile.

I'd like them to just have a site to report SEO scammers, where you could just copy and paste the URL. This would make FF/Chrome extensions trivial. Google could rank each submitter in a similar way to how they rank reCaptcha submissions as a way of discouraging abuse.

Still, I think it's becoming apparent that SEO has broken PageRank, and we really are in need of something else. Whether that something else is algorithmic, social, or, most likely, a combination of the two, remains to be seen. Still, I don't think we'll ever have a system that can't be gamed.

Funnily enough, there WAS a way to blacklist/remove sites in the SearchWiki feature ! Could you bring this back, Google ? Pretty pleeeeeeese :))

I'd love to get more insight into how Google fixes problems like this, like hopefully you don't just hard code a multiplier for stackoverflow.com or a negative one for the spam sites?

HN's "voting based on commenter" at work? This is probably single most useful comment in the entire thread, and Matt's "thank you" note had higher votes than the content? Sorry about the derail.

I've personally not seen efreedom ranking above stackoverflow. I've seen it 2 places down or one down. So this is a very valuable comment. IMHO. YMMV.

First, searched for: ppa in pbuilder

I received an eFreedom result on the second page of results, and no corresponding Stack Overflow article. The title of the eFreedom page is "DEBIAN - pbuilder storing dependencies - efreedom"

I then searched for: ppa in pbuilder site:stackoverflow.com

This gives one response - not the same article that was scraped by eFreedom. So that seems a little off - as a user I'd expect the Stack Overflow article that was scraped to meet the query if eFreedom does.

Finally, based on the title of the Stack Overflow article that was scraped in my first query, I searched for: pbuilder storing dependencies

Here the original Stack Overflow article is listed first, eFreedom second, so that's good. Unfortunately when you scan a little further down the page, the article "UBUNTU - pbuilder create fail - efreedom" is above "pbuilder create fail - Stack Overflow".

As a side point, my search is not made more valuable by the scraped versions appearing in the results. Making Stack Overflow appear before eFreedom is one thing, but why should I see eFreedom at all? I'd rather the other results be different content, that way I don't have to mentally parse everything to work out if it's the same content with a different skin.

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