Learning from StackOverflow.com

Google Tech Talk
April 24, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by Joel Spolsky

Until recently, searching for help on highly technical programming problems has been a mess. A lot of what the search engines found was old discussions in forums, where you have a lot of wrong answers and out-of-date answers that you have to sift through yourself. You also found a lot of answers at sites that were hidden behind a pay wall, which uncloaked themselves for Google and then demanded membership fees to see the answers.

StackOverflow.com is a programmer's Q&A site that launched last September to address these problems. It incorporates more modern ideas about community such as voting and public editing, and even a few ideas from game design, to create a much more successful way to get help with programming problems. In a few short months, it has grown to 14 million page views a month and reaches 3 million unique programmers every month. The lessons we've learned in creating a successful Q&A site has many implications for search which I'll share in this talk.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• tech
• talk
• stackoverflow.com
• spolsky
• programming
• help

[maximz2005]

Experts Exchange - it sucks!

[bjangoapps]

Joel is actually really well known, as is Fogbugz and Stack Overflow. Fog Creek software is typically held in the highest regard for developers... a place they'd love to work. I'm not sure "cunt" is the right label for a guy who's not only successful, but also pretty generous in terms of providing solid info for the programming world for free.

[loveshbond]

awesome

[FlatEarthHypothesis]

Why in the heck does the video keep cutting to the break room, then to somebody's webcam at their desk, etc?

[sakathecheetah]

I laughed so hard when he brought up Windows Live search in the questions. Great reaction and sense of humor.

[xyking]

@maximz2005 Expert-sex-change :) hehe

[Synergy9k]

I love Stack Overflow.

[jgoemat]

@alihammadshah I thought you had to set googlebot as your user agent.

[marigloda]

@alihammadshah I figure that out after a while, but it's changed now... There are no anwers at the bottom...

ExpertSexChange

[alihammadshah]

The secret of expert exchange is that "The answers are down at the bottom of the page you have to scroll down".