Experts Exchange - please go fuck-off and die already! : Reddnet Scribbles

Experts Exchange - please go fuck-off and die already!

Stephen M. Redd
Wednesday, February 20 2008

As a programmer, my number one tool for getting out of a tough bind is a quick google search.

Developers are chatty, and we have about a million different forums, blogs, wikis, example sites, source projects, etc. When I'm having a problem with my code, chances are that there have been many other programmers that have already found a solution, and some of them probably posted answers online somewhere.

But, in any given search, you are bound to get at least a few links to this place called "Experts Exchange".

Note: I'm not linking to Experts Exchange... this is deliberate...

Nothing about the text of the google result will stand out as being an Experts Exchange related site... it'll just have a reasonable title and an excerpt that suggests it as a good place to look.

So I click the link.

And then I see the Experts Exchange page.

... and then I just want to fucking KILL the bastards that run this fucking sham of a site!!!

The idea of Experts Exchange itself isn't so bad. A subscription based community of IT professionals working together to create a database of answers to IT related issues.

No problem in theory...

In practice though, they gimmick the big search engines like Google into returning their pages knowing that those answers are NOT going to be on the page when the user follows the link. This technique is called 'cloaking', and I am annoyed that Google doesn't remove experts exchange from their indexes for such a blatantly deceptive tactic.

The trick is against Google's own guidelines even.

My second problem is that the quality of the actual answers on experts exchange is retardedly bad. Certainly not worth paying a monthly subscription fee.

But what annoys me most is just how much of my time I've wasted having to back-track after falling for yet another worthless experts exchange link. It happens at least two or three times a day... sometimes more.

And it gets old... really old...

If I ever do finally go postal, then I'll be stopping by the offices of Experts Exchange pretty early in the tour...

Stephen M. Redd
Wednesday, February 20 2008
Filed under: Rants & Stupidity
44 Comments

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Here's a hint to see the answer without having to register/login to EE: either a.) click on the "cached" link in the Google search results; or b.) disguise yourself as the google bot user agent. More on how to do this <a href="http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/07/13/changing-user-agent-for-firefox-web-browser/">here</a>. (That's the guide I found helpful at least).

BennyA — February 20, 2008 8:51 PM
I'm with ya, and Benny stole the value of this comment. I hate them too, and what is funny is that I've seen non-technical people get pissy when they see them in the search results.

Great post!

Wayne — April 18, 2008 3:51 PM
I agree. This is very crappy. BennyA's tip is no longer working for some pages - I guess expert's exchange figured this out.

So crappy that their site has good rankings in search results when looking for a problem, but then they want you to pay.

You can always do a google search for "xp problem etc -site:expertsexchange.com" to get rid of their results intermingled with the rest of the results

CwD — April 20, 2008 8:26 AM
Are you kidding? experts-exchange.com is the most professional and responsive site to get quality answers from. You must be kidding. Remove this crummy article.

Ray — July 16, 2008 6:00 PM
Ray,

Maybe for your problems, but in general there are many people that believe experts exchange to be faulty. Both in information, and ethics. Its a marketing ploy for them to do what they are doing. It obviously works. However, it also leaves a sour taste in your mouth if your not willing to pay $25 for their service.

I have your answer (maybe I am lying, maybe I really do have your answer) I will trick you into coming to my site, make you pay for this supposed answer, only to find out that no one answered that question. Great, thats $25 bucks down the drain, and I am still stuck.

Oh wait, here is a mailing list, it has the answer. Its not as pretty as experts-exchange, but it has the answer, and the price is right (free).

Anything I have ever searched for, that experts-exchange has offered an answer for, has been found somewhere else. For free. And has taken roughly the same amount of time it would take to potentially find it on experts-exchange.

Operator207 — July 17, 2008 6:58 AM
EE is a horrible little site. I think the best one can do is to submit a report to Google reminding them that EE is plainly creating pages for search engines and not pages for users. This is a violation of one of Google's primary rules, and should be met with a reduced PageRank for EE or have EE's site removed from search results altogether.

Jeremy — September 30, 2008 9:53 AM
I am with you. E.E. is crappy and the skill of their "experts" is not that great. Do we want to talk about their site? Slow and heavy.

Alberto

Alberto — November 12, 2008 8:04 AM
i paid for a subscription at experts-exchange and canceled it the week after, was too dissatisfied

i posted a relatively trivial question but since i had trouble finding the answer on google i posted it there, one week later, one email to their customer support and 3 to their experts, i havent received one comment, nothing at all.. not even something like "sorry but your question isnt clear enough please reformulate..." ... nothing... someone almost wonders if there is anyone there answering questions.... oh well, subscription cancelled, will use google instead....

claudius — December 5, 2008 10:19 AM
Hey

I saw on your blog that you dont really like expert exchange.com , can u help me finishing my research?

1. why do you like or not like expert exchange and why?

2. If there is a tech support platform, what will you want from it? ( in term of function or feature or service)

Thanks a lot

Best Regards

Karen

karen — March 9, 2009 8:15 PM
I hear ya... I just typed "fuck experts exchange" in google and found this post.

pukerz — March 23, 2009 9:25 PM
I did the same exactly, I typed "fuck expert exchange" and got this page and it is really a spot .

We really have to do something about this fucken shitty ridiculous site.

Maged Abdelkhalek — March 24, 2009 5:15 PM
It seems "fuck expert exchange" is popular, that's also what I did after I just got to damn pissed from seeing that F*in EE link in every single search and it's always at the top!

I wish I could remove it from the results too...I REALLY hate those fucktards!

Yaser Hani — April 2, 2009 8:26 AM
"fuck experts exchange" ahoy jajaja

zalzaa — April 13, 2009 10:06 PM
@ pukerz, yaser :

I did the exact same thing. I absolutely hate getting EE in my search results.

Timm — April 17, 2009 4:58 PM
@ pukerz, yaser, timm:

I used "die experts exchange".

Angelo — April 19, 2009 8:30 AM
I just want to leave a " fuck experts exchange " string to make this post keyword popular.

xain — May 19, 2009 7:03 AM
if u found any link of ee in google search ,

You can still see the comments posted by scrolling down untill you see the footer.....

But if u copy pasted that link or anymeans i.e not from google search u cant see the comments......

give a try ....!!

coolmate — June 9, 2009 4:51 AM
fuck experts exchange!!!!!

gringo — June 26, 2009 6:42 PM
FUCK EXPERTS EXCHANGE!!!

I wanted to see if other people hate them, their "business model" and their scam of a bullshit site as much as I do, do I did my favorite trick, I typed "fuck experts echange" in on Google and lo and behold, not only do you all hate it as well, (except the obvious shills) but most of you use the same social profiling technique I do (EG typing a statement on google to see how many other people have expressed a similar sentiment).

I knoe this Blog author's original post is over a year old, however, EE still exists, still has shitty material, still is (as I understand it) violating google regs, still is manipulating search engine visitors, etc.

The other thing, which nobody mentioned, is that EE used to be free....It was free, and at the tme it was free I used it a lot to help people, I submitted a lot of answers. When I stopped by one day and noticed that I couldn't get in without paying I felt sold out...I NEVER would have participated had I known it was their intent to commercialize other people's generosity and deny access. They need to pay for this - actually, the only way they deserve to continue to operate as they do, with so many referrals in Google results, would be to make the service free and make money of advertising.

By (basically) paying for solutions like they do, they encourage solutions to be left regardless of their quality. They tend to recognize a solution as a definitive solution when an issue may have better solutions, and they have outright incorrect info at times too.

I think that a campaign should be launched - I think Google needs to be contacted by everyone who finds EE's linking manipulative. I think EE needs to be contacted (believe me, I have written them several emails over several years letting them know how fucked their bait and switch operation is).

Mox the cat — August 4, 2009 1:52 PM
FUCK EXPERTS EXCHANGE is what I typed in too ROFL! This site has made my day but what can we really do to FUCK EXPERTS EXCHANGE up? Anyone have any ideas on how to waste their time like they wasted ours or is there any way to report their dodgy business practices to an authority and get them taken down? Please post any suggestions that will really piss them off and I'm sure we will all help to make something happen!

FUCK EXPERTS EXCHANGE — August 10, 2009 3:43 PM
I now there's a Firefox search plugin that runs google searches while excluding ee from the results. But an even better solution exists to make EE matches disappear from google searches: Use Firefox with the CustomizeGoogle plugin (www.customizegoogle.com), then add the following to the Filter page:

http://*.experts-exchange.com/*

Any google search returns get stripped out and written as grayed-out one-line url's at the top of the results, like so...

www.experts-exchange.com http://www.experts-exchange.com/Database/Oracle/

Experts-Exchange - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [new window]

...

There's still there to remind you, if you want to remember to turn the feature off, but they're not there to waste time during your actual review of the results.

Gone. And hopefully forgotten! :^D

tin — August 17, 2009 1:35 PM
typed "fuck Expert Exchange" too.

Feels great to know you're not alone in frustration and awe, looking at a closed door not knowing if crap of gold lies behind.

Thx guys.

Asta — August 21, 2009 11:59 AM
Hahaha! Good article- my sentiment exactly. Fuck anyone who charges money for information, fuck whoever pays for that shit, fuck their marketing ploy, and "FUCK YOU!" -are my words every time I mistakenly click one of their worthless links while searching for an answer.

Josh — September 28, 2009 4:21 AM
Not one of the "Fuck experts-exchange" people. Typed "experts-exchange bullshit", myself. Cause really, that's what it is, bullshit. Someone trying to make a dishonest buck from something so many others are willing to give for free.

name — October 17, 2009 7:03 AM
I have no problem with people charging for a service. But if they want to charge me, the least they can do is actually pay someone to moderate and review the posts. I don't mind a pay for info site, what I mind is a pay for info site that doesn't provide any info and uses deceptive practices to constantly lure people to visit.

Stephen M. Redd — October 17, 2009 8:50 AM
I agreed FUCK EXPERT EXCHANGE for trying to charge people. The just use other people's collection of post and trying to get paid. Never using them ever again.

Vinh Nguyen — October 19, 2009 11:20 PM
and another FUCK EXPERT EXCHANGE from me ;)

robin — October 20, 2009 4:00 PM
"and another FUCK EXPERT EXCHANGE from me ;)"

same here

bob — October 28, 2009 4:12 PM
+1 from me

lev — November 11, 2009 1:54 PM
Count me in with a huge "fuck experts exchange!"

XD

Hate that evil web site!

Demián — November 11, 2009 9:38 PM
Fuck them!

steve Feaster — November 16, 2009 7:00 PM
Ray you dumb fucking piece of shit how can you say that? I was reading other EE hater comments some other day and it surprises me that there are actually so DUMB people like you who admire a last annoyware scam site like exprets-exchange.

Im being a sysadmin since 10 years, searching a lot of software, os, networking related questions on google and this shit is keep coming up. What they do is worst than spamming junk emails (what I dont care about lately at all).

I bet these scumbags get like 4-500K unique hits on their page/day.

The google plugin is a good thing but if you work on different computers during the day you cant install it to all and it's not the solution. Google, Altavista, Yahoo should realize what a scam site this is, just like fullreleases was and not just remove it but blacklist it as well!

Daniel — November 20, 2009 12:33 AM
I agree - I came across the site with a similar expletive. I'm so sick of their results being shown and accidentally clicking into their worthless site. Does someone know where to issue a complaint to Google?

Doug — November 29, 2009 8:24 PM
In 2010 the problem still stands, as much people here I arrived here by typing "fuck experts-exchange"...

Good article anyway

Gargamel — January 18, 2010 8:24 AM
I'm a current contributor to EE as are 200+ other Microsoft MVPs

If the site was so pathetic, worthless and a complete rort, then you guys wouldn't be here whinging, EE would be defunct ..... hmmmm.

If you don't like it don't go there. And if you don't like the google results just filter them out - or perhaps some of you aren't quite at tech savvy as you loudly proclaim

Happy browsing

Sooky La La — January 25, 2010 6:29 AM
Ha, nice name there "Sooky La La". I do appreciate the irony :)

"If the site was so pathetic, worthless and a complete rort, then... EE would be defunct"

Well, maybe maybe not.

First, my complaint isn't that EE exists... my complaint is the deceptive and disgusting gimmicks they use to sucker unsuspecting traffic into their site.

And my article didn't go into it, but I'm personally also more than a little annoyed at the many times, especially earlier in EE's history, where my own posts from other (more respected) forums landed up on EE's site... and that was hardly a "rare occurance" limited to just a few of us either... a LOT of people's stuff ended up "accidentally" reposted on EE. In fact... nearly all of EE's useful content was from repostings early on.

I don't mind people re-posting my content, especially content that I contributed freely for the benefit of my fellow programmers. But I do mind my content being used to deceive my fellow programmers for the profit of a shit-bag company like EE!

Sure, they stopped doing that kind of shit after there were enough threats and lawyers up their ass; but they did it just long enough to build up a reasonable content base of their own, land a few paying customers, and then even start paying a couple of legit contribs too... though quite a lot of their content are rather obvious paraphrased repostings from other sources, but at least they had the decency not to use my fucking name in their content and to at least put some effort into having some word-monkey re-arrange the sentences a little.

So yea, most of that stolen content did vanish from EE... eventually.

But once they'd boosted their way to semi-legit status on the backs of others without so much as a reach-around, I wouldn't expect them to go out of business just because they don't deserve to be in business.

I don't see how you'd assume that either.

It is retardedly cheap to operate a site like EE and still make a profit from people that just don't know enough not to pay the subscription fee.

And besides that, non-tech companies that don't know all this about EE would be quite impressed when the EE's marketing folk show them "how many hits they get a day" from all those hijacked search results... I'm sure that lets them make a decent amount of cash from those big banner ads even in today's rather web-ad adverse environment.

Nothing will ever change the fact that this company is a bucket of shit... it always has been, and it doesn't really matter how much they clean up their act and try to be all "legitimate".

But I don't expect them to go under until Google and other search engines actually enforce their rules and stop letting sites like EE game them either.

Stephen M. Redd — January 25, 2010 8:08 AM
Stephen,

But you don't even understand what the site does ...

The vast bulk of the EE users pay a monthly fee to ask questions, mainly relating to customised programming solutions. They aren't there to access existing static content.

Again, why would anyone pay a website for information that's freely available in the forums. Answer .... they don't.

The general population isn't stupid. Whereas people with vendettas tend to significantly overstate their case

End Sub.

All Sooked out — January 25, 2010 9:21 AM
I typed "experts exchange" bad

I just cancelled their free trial 7 days before the trial ended. Took screenshots every step of the way ( and what a long journey it was) and saved the email.

Do you guys know that in order to cancel you are forced to provide feedback

This tactic alone is a cause for legal action

Anyways.. What is involved in setting up an online petition to get Google to remove this parasite?

Jim — January 26, 2010 4:41 PM
Google has been waging a pretty active war with them over the years. The problem is that google is in a tough position. They can't just punish any company they choose without drawing legal fire of their own, so any rules that they enforce have to be carefully applied to every site on the net equally.

So over the years, there has been a constant tug-of-war with EE. Sometimes EE comes up with a gimik and gets itself elevated in the search ranks far out of proportion... such was the case when I posted the article. But at other times, google is able to counteract the dirty tactics.

As it is today, EE actually does have the content that google's search spider picks up on their pages. The cloaking tactic I described has been defeated.

But, you just have to scroll to the very bottom of the page to see the answers now, and most of the page is a repeat of "you have to pay to see the answers". But if you keep scrolling, you will actually come to real answers... EE is banking that most users won't scroll that far down though.

But, from Google's perspective, the user facing page does have the same view of the text as the one shown to the google bot, and the content is actually "legitimate" content too.

Stephen M. Redd — January 26, 2010 5:51 PM
you just have to scroll the page to the bottom to see the answers:)

UnknowError — February 4, 2010 8:18 AM
i typed "fuck screen c#" and found this post

Yvan Dubois — February 8, 2010 1:33 PM
fuck expertexchange

fuck expertexchange — February 16, 2010 3:55 PM
Got here by searching on 'experts exchange bastards'. But fuck them anyway.

Ron The Bear — February 26, 2010 7:14 AM
Trying to find solutions to a particularly annoying SSD formatting issue. EE apparently has the 'solution.' Do not care. Googled 'fuck experts exchange' as well. Lulz. Will use the -site google-fu tactic.

Nate — March 5, 2010 7:11 AM

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