Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

Gotta wonder though: should StackOverflow.com rank high for "stack overflow"? After all, a "stack overflow" isn't necessarily related to programming questions. Yes, you can ask questions on StackOverflow.com about stack overflows, but that's missing the point. So if I have a domain name that's a thing, but my site has very little content related to that thing, should I rank high for queries about that thing?

View on HN

So are you saying people searching for "stack overflow" want the definition more often than the web site stackoverflow.com?

Because that doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps an upcoming engineer once or twice needs the definition in their life. And they will mostly go on to use the site as well.

Lazy people like me often type the approximate of a web site into Google rather than trying to guess the exact url / bookmarking it. And we do this continuously.

I can't see the definition being more popular than the site.

Would a person struggling with a stack overflow actually google "stack overflow", though? Surely only a very fresh programmer would need to google it, and only if he/she knew what the concept was. But here's what an infinite recursion in a C program prints if I run it:

    Segmentation fault: 11

Well, that's C for you. If I try Ruby:

    test.rb:2: stack level too deep (SystemStackError)

Ok, still not the same nomenclature. Python:

    RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

Nope. How about Go? ... Actually, an infinitely recursing function in Go never completes on my machine. I wonder why. Perhaps it's not using the stack the way I expect.

If you do the same thing in Java:

    Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StackOverflowError

Ok, there it is.

But if do you get that, would you not google "StackOverflowError", as opposed to "stack overflow"?

(Then again, my Google searches are perhaps uncommonly precise. If a function "foobar()" in library "libfoo" overflowed when processing HTTPS URLs, I would probably google for "foobar stack overflow libfoo https url".)

The Wikipedia entry for stack overflow (the concept) is the fourth hit on a search for "stack overflow". Should be acceptable to a newbie.

I remember having seen "stack overflow" when I naïvely tried to allocate a 5MB array on the stack in Visual C++ 2010.

Trying this with GCC gives me a segfault (although I had to go higher up to 8 MB).

    #include <stdio.h>

    int main(void) {
      char x[8388608];
      printf("%ld\n", sizeof(x));
      return 0;
    }

My point was that Visual C++ 2010 gives a different error, but it was running in debug mode.

And my point was that GCC was not as helpful in that case. :-) With the GNU C library you will have to install your own signal handlers and jump through a lot of hoops to get anything more sensible than a "segmentation fault" error. You would think our tools would be a bit more modern by now.

Oh by the way, I'm not sure if it was exactly 5MB, it might actually have been 2MB. This particular case was 2 years ago, now.

Re go:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4226964/how-come-go-doesn...

Clever birds.

> Actually, an infinitely recursing function in Go never completes on my machine.

Maybe your function is tail-recursive? Try to use the return value from the recursive call in a nontrivial way, so that stack storage is necessary to store some local variable.

Apparently Go allocates the stack as a heap structure, as was pointed out in another comment: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4226964/how-come-go-doesn...

"only a very fresh programmer would need to google it"

It's why this is a top story on Headquarters of Noobs. Not surprising. You mean Lenny Kravitz didn't write American Woman?

What's HQoN?

There are more links on pages with the words "stack overflow" near the link, or with the anchor text itself "stack overflow", pointing to stackoverflow.com than to any other page on the web. Lacking additional context, the web teaches Google's algorithm that when someone is talking about "stack overflow", they are referring to stackoverflow.com more often than anything else.

If you made a website called "Nikon Cameras" today but the site had nothing about Nikon Cameras on it, it would not rank well for the search "Nikon Cameras". Other people writing about Nikon Cameras would not link to your site more often than something actually about Nikon Cameras.

Google couldn't care less about some abstract notion of whether results are "correct". They want to provide the results that people are looking for, and that's it. I'd wager that most people searching for "stack overflow" are after the site, not the concept. By putting stackoverflow.com at the top, they are providing most people with the result they seek.

Your site should rank high for queries about that thing if people routinely search for that term while attempting to find your site.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com