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 A lot of what the search engines found was old discussions in forums, where you have a lot of wrong answers and out-of-date answers that you have to sift through yourself.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

[maximz2005]

Experts Exchange - it sucks!

[Synergy9k]

I love Stack Overflow.

[zurechtweiser]

Of course they have. With "What have you tried".

[playlistsefavoritos]

91.3% have been answered.

[playlistsefavoritos]

Lower statistics are more vulnerable to be skewed.

[2beeeornot2beee]

STAY AWAY FROM THIS SITE IF YOU ARE A BEGINNER ...THESE ARE FOR THE HARDCORE FATASS THAT SIT 24 HOURS A DAY IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER

[R koyee]

if they don't understand your question or they don't know it...they will vote it down or delete it.

[R koyee]

I hate stack overflow because there are a group of members moderators they act like a dictator



[ImpostorModanica]

Or for example in the last too months everything I ask Google shows the first 2-5 results, sometimes all 10 results(!) for a scam website askmefast (.) com - that's lame.

[zurechtweiser]

Stackoverflow closes every other question because it is disliked, not because it is off-topic or whatever reason is chosen for closing.

[Mark Stouffer]

it used to be expertsexchange dot calm until they put the hyphen in.

[poll6666]

Google suck in content ranking, youtube videos that have lots of likes but not many views aren't pushed as much as videos with lots of views even if they have lots of dislikes. So if you search for something you have to browse to page #110 to finally get a good video on the subject. That's basic, I don't care about the # of views dammit, give me the best content. The engineers are plain stupid