Stack Overflow is the ultimate long-tail resource. My favorite example of this is, what I consider to be, a very obscure question I asked then answered about getting (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/570076/netbeans-forwarded...) anti-aliased fonts and sub-pixel rendering working when running java software on a remote X11 server. This sort of thing is incredibly esoteric, yet, close to 1,000 people have looked at it in the last year. When I asked the question, and found the answer, there was no useful information that I could find about it, yet when you search on google today for 'x11 java anti-alias' the first result is my question, and the second is someone elses.
No, unfortunately it wouldn't. The google juice is completely concentrated on the stackoverflow domain — I constantly find insta-moved SO questions at the top of the search results, with the moved question on SF or SU nowhere to be found. Yet another defect of their asinine community silo policy.
They don't do a 301 redirect — how would google know where the real question is?
we do a 301 redirect if the stub is deleted. We probably should be auto-deleting the migration stubs after a period of time but haven't gotten to that quite yet.
I actually have trouble contributing to StackOverflow as much as I'd like. The community has gotten so good that most questions with my realm (Scala & Java) seem to be answered within 30 minutes. Since I only look for questions to answer a few times a week, I never find anything.
At least I can get points by asking good questions.
This is great news, if for no other reason that prowling google for answers is 100%[1] more effective than it used to be, as most searches lead me straight to stackoverflow.
[1] well, 100%-ish. I've not measured this. Nor am I going to.
There seem to be a number of sites that just poorly mirror content from StackOverflow. They usually have the question and then maybe some answers, but don't usually include comments to answers or even which answer was marked as correct.
It's very frustrating when they come up above StackOverflow in Google searches. I end up slowing down a lot to make sure I don't click on those results. Sure I could just go straight to StackOverflow which I often do, but there are other good sources of programming knowledge on the internet that I want to be able to find too.
These mirror sites are also frustrating because they are blatantly leaching off of the work of both the StackOverflow developers and the StackOverflow community. Kind of makes me wish Google did have a blacklist for these cases.
When we find out about these cases, we ask them to conform to our creative commons license agreement by linking back to stackoverflow.com, in hopes that ultimately this will teach Google that they are non-canonical and rank them lower than us.
That might be so, but right now there's about three of them and they clog up the search results with essentially the same answer but lower quality for the reasons mentioned above. So far I've not seen any that outrank stackoverflow, but it's only a matter of time before one does some blackhat and jumps for certain questions.
You say that they link back, but in the cases I've seen, they link back with a slightly different Url form to the one you use.
Maybe it's time to start rejecting some bots crawling the site, or at least to slow them right down.
It's a problem for Google and for SO, so someone from both places should probably be talking about it. Because in the end, SO starts looking spammy because the others are spammy and scrape the content, which is exactly the opposite case of how things should be. The spam sites are just cloning SO and shoving crappy ads everywhere, it's not high quality content. When you ask a question, you want 5 different answers from 5 different site, not the same answer spammed 5 times back at you.
To conveniently search all of their stackexchange sites using Google including stackoverflow.com, try the search box on http://stackexchange.com/.
This somewhat helps with a problem they are facing which is fragmentation of questions and answers across their sites. For example, for Ubuntu you might need to search three or four of their sites before finding an answer to an issue you are having.
Name : [so] Search StackOverflow // the "[so]" here is just a mnemonic
Location : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astackoverflow.com+%s
Keyword : so
Then, when I want to search for "vim vs emacs" on SO, I open a new tab (Ctrl + T), type "so vim vs emacs", and press enter. This searches "site:stackoverflow.com vim vs emacs" on Google.
I have a similar smart bookmarks setup for HN searches, and you could get more creative if you want (DuckDuckGo search, or even a custom StackExchange search like rayvega mentioned, using "http://stackexchange.com/search?q=%s in the location field).
Just to clarify, in Chrome this works automatically. After performing one search on Stack Overflow, you can now start typing "stack overflow" into the address bar. As soon as you see that the first autocompletion is StackOverflow.com, you can hit tab and perform a search.
This works automatically with any site you perform a search on, with no need to configure anything. One of the main reasons I moved to Chrome after years of being an FF user.
Weird... it used to be on duckduckgo that if a Stack Overflow result was your first result, the answer would actually be displayed as well, but that doesn't seem to be working right now: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Netbeans+Forwarded+over+X11+Font
You can always just search Stack Overflow directly (I consider it to have an adequate search engine), which is easily done in Chrome by typing stackoverflow.com (often only the first two characters), tab, and then your query.
My experience tells me that they usually are the first search result in google -- and when they aren't, I specifically look for them in the search results because the site is incredibly accurate and useful and I have come to trust it.
Just as a side note, please make sure to upvote both the question and any helpful answers if you've found the question using Google and it helped you as that's how Stackoverflow dynamics work.
It seems like very few people understand that it doesn't cost anything to upvote other answers and especially questions. Lots of good questions get around 0-2 votes, but clearly draw significant activity and interest otherwise. Are people afraid of point inflation?
They've also recently created a Gold "Electorate" badge, which is defined as "Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions." This should encourage people to vote up good questions as well as good answers.
I feel that since there are comments, answering a question should automatically upvote it. It depends on what the criteria for upvoting a question is - whether it's "not spam/trash or poorly worded" then this would work, I feel most people go on "it taught me something amazing/unique" however.
The problem is that it isn't clear WHY you should upvote a question.
Upvoting an answer is helpful - I'm saying that I confirm that it's correct and you should believe it - but upvoting a question is just gold star time.
Ah dammit. I noticed a couple of days ago the number of questions was at 997k. I meant to keep an eye out and see if I could ping in number 1 million - but then promptly forgot.
How many of those are duplicates of existing questions — doesn't heralding growth contradict the original site goal of wiki-edited QA that stays fresh forever?
We've come a long way since expertsexchange.