Excluding Experts Exchange from Search Results
Experts Exchange drives me crazy. When I’m trying to solve a problem and I click an Experts Exchange link, I feel like I’ve been duped and I’ll never get those precious seconds back. I’ve been complaining loudly about this to my friends off and on for a while. One of them suggested a solution the other day.
I once found an article about setting up a customer search engine that would allow you to permanently exclude sites. I’d have to remember to use my custom search engine every time, so I never tried it out.
My friend suggested that I use the Firefox plugin CustomizeGoogle. It allows you to filter sites in your results. I added /experts-exchange/ to the filter list and now Experts Exhange links are greyed out:
Hooray! No more bait and switch for me!
I mentioned a while back that I was curious about the information contained in the site, and someone gave me a very good hint.
Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll find the entire thread. They aren’t allowed to give different search results to the GoogleBot and the visitors, so they just hide the good stuff at the bottom of the page. I had no idea, but I’ve used that several times.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:07 amWith Experts Exchange (I found this out by accident), all of the posts that are edited out or obfuscated are actually at the very very bottom of the page. For example:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Scripting/Perl/Q_21436702.html
Scroll all the way down to the bottom. Your answers are in plain text :-).
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 amI prefer to not feed the trolls. Vote with your visits?
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:40 amOooo, like it. I *hate* that fucking site!
They used to ‘hide’ their content with some javascript, overlaying the text with some opaque layer, that you could easily greasemonkey your way out of.
Bastards.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:48 amThank you! A truly handy tip.
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 amJust view the page source, the answers are hidden by javascript. That’s something that Mauricio pointed out to me.
Michelle
October 24th, 2008 at 10:01 pm