It takes a website of bastards to hold us back

[hirez]

Experts-exchange == utter wankers.

Oh, and those tossrags who want to charge you for the download of free-from-the-manufacturer drivers. Haddaway an' shite, y'friggers.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I thought everyone had moved to Stack Overflow now?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Is that not just for coding malarkey?

(It also implies that real people actively use(d) E-E for solving problems, which makes a chap boggle somewhat.)

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

I believe they are planning to launch one for sysadmins called Server Overload or something like that.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

http://serverfault.com/

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

It can be useful for those of us still using Netware! Not that I'm a subscriber - the answers are there if you can be arsed to scroll down.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Expert Sex Change seems to serve no purpose other than polluting search results.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Precisely so.

There's a growing class of problems where employing Google and ending somewhere phpbb-powered is just going to make you want to shake Linux weenies warmly by the throat.

Mind you, I'm glad that I don't have to put up with the HP IT forums any more.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Their advertisers need to get savvy that it's not worth counting an ad impression if someone clicks back a second after landing on the page...

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

Seconded!

[thepaintedone.livejournal.com]

It's number two on my list of things that Google needs a default filter for.

Number one being endless 'directory' sites that are just another list of random links relating to your search term.

[alien8.livejournal.com]

www.givemebackmygoogle.com WFM...

there's a firefox search plugin, look on http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?category=66 for them/it.

[ingaborg.livejournal.com]

Does this not just change your search engine? Surely the same stuff will still come up?

[alien8.livejournal.com]

nope, it adds a metric fsckton of -filters for all the shopping/comparison sites.

makes a _huge_ difference!

Fixed.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

[original search terms] -site:experts-exchange.com

Job done. The key bit being the minus, which is the negation operator in Google, and may be combined with other operators such as site-specific search. For example, compare and contrast:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Toshiba+Satellite+sm+bus+driver

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Toshiba+Satellite+sm+bus+driver+-site%3Aexperts-exchange.com

Shall I put my smug hat on now?

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

IIRC, expert sex change hide the answers with javascript, so if you poke around in the raw HTML, you can actually get useful answers out of it.

And there is a thingy somewhere in google for filtering out horrid useless businesses like kelkoo et al.

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

whenever view sex change in firefox i just scroll down past the middle gumph and the answers are always on display at the bottom. can't beat broken webbagge.

[sinibar.livejournal.com]

Aye, every time I've used it I've found the filled-out answers at the bottom of the page. You just have to scroll a long way. I can't help thinking that this is not broken but by design - maybe some day I'll be bored enough to look at the code. Frankly though that's unlikely as if I'm desperate enough to be on expert sex change then time is not normally a commodity of which I have much.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Agreed. "What is the command to list files in unix? Pay us twenty bucks and we'll tell you!"

The sad thing is that there are probably people who do so because they don't know any better.

[spride.livejournal.com]

I've never understood what the appeal is, unless it's for people too thick to read knowledgebase articles for themselves. Oh, wait…