Stackoverflow Eating Away at Experts-Exchange

[Feynman]

About time... I can't be the only one who thinks Experts-Exchange is lame...

[dca]

Agreed - they've been corrupting my search results for far too long. Its refreshing to see this in its place.

[tlrobinson]

I think Joel and Jeff also though ExpertsExchange was lame, and that's partly why they created StackOverflow.

[_giu]

it's truly lame, but I always have to laugh when I hit CTRL + END on their question-pages

[mg1313]

Yeah, I thought so too....bye-bye EE, if you don't adapt.

[jkuria]

Experts-exchange may be lame to many of the folks on this list because it is perhaps more useful to a 'light weight' crowd with a more IT bent (rather than hard core developer). I would venture to say that StackOverflow will NEVER match experts-exchange in traffic. There are just not that many smart programmers compared to the masses of IT folks and the general public that EE caters to.

[andrewljohnson]

I'd say catching, but not eating away.

There's nothing in this graph that suggests market share is being taken away.

[uhytghyt]

Except the unique visitors to hyphen also includes those that go there from Google, find they have to sign up and immediately go away in disgust.

[dmv]

decrease in monthly uniques (-2.69%) against continued strong growth (10.70%)? The overall market is growing because there are two (2M visitors/month combined, vs 900k a year ago). But the mix has steadily changed. If that's not market share loss, what is it?

[lutorm]

Huh, were you looking at the same plot I was?

If two sites cater to the same clientele, and stackoverflow has gone from zero to some significant fraction, how is that not a market share going from 100% to ~70%? Just because there is no huge decrease in ee doesn't mean they are not losing market share, because all those stackoverflow hits could have been ee.

[DavidSJ]

Market share always adds up to 100%.

[SwellJoe]

Good. ExpertSexChange.com is just awful, with their "must be registered to see this answer" BS. I always groan aloud whenever I accidentally click on a link in Google search results, since it's just a waste of my time. And, of course, I go right back to searching.

[enomar]

You might already know this, but I believe the answer is always on the landing page. You just have to scroll all the way down. They put enough crap on the top of the page to make you think you have to login.

The site is still lame though ;)

[ibsulon]

It occurs to me that I'd be more interested in reading articles written by experts in sex reassignment surgery (sex change) than most of the tripe on there.

[dannyr]

Do the figures for ExpertSexChange include those people who clicked on it from Google then went back to searching again after finding out that you need to pay/login?

If that is the case, ExpertSexChange is in bad shape than what the stat suggests.

[kqr2]

Actually, you have to scroll through a lot of bs, but the answer you are googling for is at the bottom of the page.

[tedunangst]

That seems consistent with the graph when you change the view from uniques to just visits.

[akronim]

Before you get too excited, experts exchange still had +55.27% growth, it's not like it's dying. There isn't much of a trend to the (absolute) gap between the two sites.

[pbhjpbhj]

say it with me everybody - correlation is not equal to causation

[dannyr]

Remember to vote down any ExpertSexChange pages in Google.

Hopefully, they would eventually go way down in the search results.

[Nwallins]

> vote down ... in Google.

Wait, what? You can vote for/against google search results?

[subbu]

Even better, just click on that cross button so that the whole search result goes away. That's what I do whenever I see an entry from experts-exchange.

[dpnewman]

I actually did a virtual toast when google results started offering the [x] removal/non-relevant option for the sole reason that I could have a say in removing e-e results whenever they showed up. How many times I have clicked on a e-e link and cursed my way to the backspace key? I honestly cannot count. I don't begrudge a pay business model at all! .. just being honest that as a busy programmer, knowing that my answer lies somewhere on a free forum, I so often end up wasting time with a tease of an answer lying behind a CC wall.

[paulgb]

Same here. What really bugs me is that Google could have made their users happier and put this thing to rest years ago if they just gave e-e an ultimatum, or better yet, dropped them from the index without warning. That's what they did to other sites, for example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4685750.stm

[jsz0]

If there was a way to permanently blacklist experts exchange from my Google searches I would do it in an instant. As far as I can tell you can only moderate it down each time you see it which frankly seems to have zero relevance to your future searches. You'd think after demoting it 50 times Google would realize I'm not interested but... nope. Seems to always be in my top 10 searches when trying to solve a problem.

[w1ntermute]

If you're using Firefox, you can remove Google search results by URL with the CustomizeGoogle extension (http://www.customizegoogle.com/). Go to the "Filter" section of its configuration to do so.

It also has many other useful Google tweaks, like removal of text ads and click tracking.

[jim-greer]

Looks like stackoverflow put in Quantcast a few days ago, so you can see their direct traffic numbers. ~250K daily uniques, which I'd guess puts them easily above 2 million monthly. Compete numbers suck, as usual.

http://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com#traffic

[justlearning]

Until a while back(a year?), I recall that if you came across a question on ExpExch, there would be lots of 'join now' buttons (those blingy types) just below. But If you go down the page down - about 2 page downs - all the answers were there to be read. This way, I did find some decent answers once in a while.

anyway, good riddance.

[seldo]

Experts-exchange has an annoying and deceptive business model. Does Stack Overflow make any money? Is it supposed to?

[edrtfgdr]

It breaks even on a very small amount of ads. There are plans to make more money with a job board and a contractor/client bidding board. They also have plans for internal enterprise versions for companies. It was recently valued at $1M during a recent podcast.

[DanielStraight]

At least Experts-Exchange has a legal agreement/TOS page. rolls eyes at StackOverflow

[mrbad101]

How come nobody has mentioned that if you are coming from google, you just clicked the "Cached" button on the search results page?

They allow google to cache the entire page, with the answers. No login needed. I've never checked if a referer thing or not. Don't really care to investigate since the cache works fine.

[utnick]

I've been using Bing for the past week, apparently Experts Exchange looks for the google referrer and if present shows the solution on the page, otherwise if you are using Bing or something else you have to register to see the solution.

Very Annoying. I wish google/bing/yahoo would just ban EE.

[online]

I am pretty happy with this news. I am sick of experts-exchange. When u searched something you got a link of exchange-experts, but technically you got nothing because u need to login or register or pay or something else to see the content.

[mivok]

The actual values are probably even word for expertsexchange than that. The traffic to serverfault.com and superuser.com should be added to the above values also.

[csomar]

i'm not against expert-exchange for charging for help, but against listing their results in Google search, while they are not real results -> Mislead people!

[heycarsten]

Death to Experts Exchange!

[entelarust]

thank god is all i have to say

[dunk010]

Thank god!