A post by Joel Spolsky announcing a new site he and Jeff Atwood are building (stackoverflow.com) covers the same theme as my recent Don’t believe everything you read, In the process of describing why he’s doing this, he nailed one of my pet peeves. In this passage, he’s talking about programmers, but he could just as easily be talking about newbie end users or IT professionals or Exchange administrators:
[T]hey happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can’t figure something out, they type a question into Google.
And sometimes, the first result looks like it’s going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it’s a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you have to buy a membership.
And you won’t even get an expert answer. You’ll get a bunch of responses typed by other programmers like you. Some of the responses will be wrong, some will be right, some may be out of date, and it’s hard to imagine that with the cooperative spirit of the internet this is the best thing we programmers have come up with.
Joel’s too polite to mention the sites he’s talking about, but I’m not. I am sick and tired of looking up an error message or a troubleshooting term and getting taken to a link at Experts-exchange.com (I won’t include a link, because I don’t want to send them the traffic and it would only annoy you to see this in action). When you click on that link, you get to read the question someone asked, which is pretty close to the question you asked, but the answers are cloaked with text that says you have to pay for a membership before you’re allowed to read the replies. And it’s apparent from the structure of the replies that there’s no “expert” involved, just a bunch of other (paid) user/members.
Now, I have no argument with Experts Exchange trying to make a living with this economic model. If it works for them, good. But I do object to Google indexing these results and sending me to sites where the landing page is a teaser rather than the actual content I’m looking for. I’m not sure how to register that complaint, but I do know that the Google spider pays a visit here every so often, so maybe I just did.
(h/t to Dwight Silverman for the pointer)
Ed, thanks again for your reply. In our opinion, there’s no reason why paid content ought not to show up in results when it is relevant to the search. So we will have to agree to disagree.
If Google hypothetically offered you a chance to fund an account which would be debited each time you viewed paid content, but would then take you directly to the content from the search result, would you sign up for it? In other words, is your objection merely to the intervening page that is in the way of the paid content, or do you just flat out object to paying for content on the web? I wonder how some of your other commenters would answer.
Just to correct a point, Experts Exchange is not a customer of ours and never has been. If they were using our solution, it would not be possible to read their full content in the cache or by disabling cookies!
Best wishes,
Evan Rudowski
SubHub
I was getting pretty tired of Experts-Exchange after the google cache trick stopped working for me. On a whim, I decided to log on to Experts-Exchange with an account I registered back in 2000 when it was free. Amazingly it still worked and I’ve been able to see the answers without paying.
“I think the principle is the same; if someone feels the content is valuable, they should pay for it. If not, that’s fine too. It’s up to the site owner to make the content valuable and relevant enough to be worth paying for.”
ExpertsExchange has absolutely no right to charge people to access answers that include information published free by Microsoft and others. I certainly am extremely displeased to find one of my articles linked from those scam artists.
I am slightly disappointed that experts-exchange now include a hyphen in their URL. They never used to and it was one of the most unintentionally funny things in existence.
Expert-Exchange? sounds like a s**t. Google should remove it permanently. even some hacking sites such Astalavista are much better helpful than that s**t
Sorry, missed one: to Evan Rudowski, his company and also E-E, do not ever play with many people like me for taking advantage by abusing free google search engine as your self interest. however your tricky way is so dirty and not deserve any reward at all. shame on you dude
Yes, absolutely, Google should seriously consider this. At minimum, the results should be very negatively weighted. I agree however, any site that forces you to pay for garbage should NOT be included in “PUBLIC SEARCH RESULTS!!!” get rid of that crap! c’mon google, you in cahoots? Don’t use auto-login uid/passwords to crawl sites! this is a simple rule and some bonehead has convinced you otherwise. Fire that guy and dump that behavior for “HEAVEN’S SAKE!”