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Learning from StackOverflow.com

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Uploaded by on Apr 29, 2009

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 A lot of what the search engines found was old discussions in forums, where you have a lot of wrong answers and out-of-date answers that you have to sift through yourself.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.

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Science & Technology

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  • likes, 16 dislikes

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Top Comments

  • Experts Exchange - it sucks!

  • 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.

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  • awesome

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

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

  • @maximz2005 Expert-sex-change :) hehe

  • I love Stack Overflow.

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

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

    ExpertSexChange

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

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