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Comment by romanovcode | Hacker News Reader

Let's just hope there will be no "Pay to see the answer" thing happening like this one website experts exchange or whatever it was called.

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Way back in 2008, Google had a feature called SearchWiki that let you X-out or upvote search results. It was little used, but apparently the most frequent usage was to delete ExpertsExchange results. IIRC we ended up making some changes to webspam that resulted in ExpertsExchange links falling off the front page, and then SearchWiki was unlaunched because it was no longer necessary.

I’m dying to have that feature again.

I just want to downvote/remove W3Cschools and upvote MDN.

What's your beef with W3schools? IMO the code examples work, and the explanations are relatively short and to the point. MDN is harder to read for new learners as everything is documented like an API.

What's your beef with W3schools?

Probably a ten-year-old beef. W3Schools used to spam search results with questionable-at-best information. I forget whether they got bought, or just cleaned up their act, but the current version is vastly improved over what it was. Still, I have muscle memory that hesitates to click one of their links despite knowing that W3Schools sucks much, much less than they used to.

Yes, I want to remove quora from my results. I vaguely remember you could block websites forever in google a long time ago, but I may be misremembering it.

Well, this still works.

`my_search_phrase -quora.com`

W3Schools is also nice because, though MDN are more comprehensive and have a higher quality appearance, their examples are more on point and they've a playground functionality where you can test any of them on an online editor with a complete code rather than just change the property on a limited demo.

You'd probably also downvote all the pay-for-placement results on Google's search page now. That would lead to some difficult questions.

You mean ads? I don't think search results themselves are altered based on payments.

Depends. We have trained ourselves to be blind to garish pictures top and bottom, or over to the side... But when the top item in the search results column proper is distinguished from the others only by a laconic "sponsored result" label below it, is that perceived as what we usually call "an ad"? I'd say it's pretty reasonable to call that "pay for placement".

They certainly have bought a lot of very useful "user-generated data", would be a shame if they restricted access to it now or in the future.

The user generated content is under a fairly liberal license so if they restricted access someone could just create a mirror.

Not that they give a shit, they retroactively relicensed all submitted content and all previous data dumps, without rights to do that, and all they suffered was downvotes on their announcement.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

in that case I've jumped to conclusions, that's great

Wasn’t that the one where if you just kept scrolling down far enough you’d end up seeing the answer at the bottom? lol

For the first couple months I couldn’t shake this feeling I was looking at a shady site. Then one day it dawned on me I had been subconsciously reading “expert sex change” the whole time. Terrible domain choice.

This comment reminds me of those kids in middle school who would tell you to write, "pen 15" on a piece of paper and then laugh like crazy when you did because it resembles the word "penis".

"Type 58008 into your calculator. Now turn it upside down!"

I always had the same issue with Microsoft Exchange which was frequently abbreviated as MS Exchange, which translates to msexchange if you want to use it in DNS.

Anyway after years of dealing with that I went ahead and got the sex change and everything is good now. ;)

I mean, the domain is experts-exchange.com. There's a dash there to prevent this mistake from happening.

They changed it.

I can assure you that they have not.

The landing page for expertsexchange.com just says "Coming soon.", and if you view it with redirects turned on, you're sent to a page offering to sell it, owned by Venture.com.

  # curl expertsexchange.com
  <html><head><title>expertsexchange.com</title></head><body><h1>expertsexchange.com</h1><p>Coming soon.</p></body></html>
  
  # dig +short expertsexchange.com | head -3 | paste -sd,
  96.126.123.244,45.79.19.196,45.33.2.79
  
  # dig +short experts-exchange.com | head -3 | paste -sd,
  104.22.5.165,104.22.4.165,172.67.36.241

  # whois experts-exchange.com | grep Registrar
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.networksolutions.com

  # whois expertsexchange.com | grep Registrar
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.uniregistrar.com

Oh and apparently, if you don't have adblock then you get a whole bunch of ads[0] that I'm presuming are based on this particular crawler's browsing habits?

[0]: https://archive.ph/bJKtW

According to DNS expertsexchange.com was registered in 2005. However, it definitely existed earlier:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...

Edited to add: so the domain lapsed and then was reregistered later. If you click on any of the links in that archived page they are redirections to experts-exchange.com.

The domain was experts-exchange.com from the very beginning. Archive.org even has the 1997 version of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/19970421013342/https://www.exper...

https://web.archive.org/web/20000302050619/http://www.expert...

That's exactly the kind of site Stack Overflow replaced, namely ExpertSexchange.

"Pay to be marked off topic" would be a great idea.

A lot of times if you just kept scrolling past the paywall the answer was at the bottom.

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