How To Hack Experts Exchanges In Two Steps
Posted on August 23, 2007, under How To, Tools and Services.
Experts Exchange use to be a valuable resource for finding answers to common and uncommon problems, and is a good resource for developers. The problem is now they employ some “shady” techniques to get it Google’s top pages results to promote their paid content. This is against Google’s Terms of Use, and some are pushing to get it removed from Google search results.
Personally for me, when I am searching for an answer to something online while developing, I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to click on one of their links that pushes signing up for a membership. Most users have no intention of signing up, and they led you to this page under false pretenses. I am all for companies making money, but they are polluting Google page results and leading you to paid content. Not something that sits well for Google or Experts Exchange. I usually do not promote “hacking” techniques, but I would hardly consider this hacking; it’s really just using your browser. So lets get started:
Here are what Experts Exchange answers usually look like. Blocked out with overlays promoting their pay service.
The basis of this technique is we are going to block Experts Exchange from setting any cookies on your browser, and this tutorial is a walk through for Firefox you can do the same in IE.
Step One: Clear Existing Cookies From Expert Exchange
Go to your options under the “Tools” menu in Firefox, and click on the “Privacy” tab. Next click on the “Show Cookies…” button. Search for any cookies for “experts-exchange.com” and delete them.
You can now close out of this dialog.
Step Two: Setup a Block Filter for Experts Exchange:
Now you want to click on the “Exceptions…” button, and type “experts-exchange.com” in the text box. Now click the “Block” button, and then close out of this dialog and all the way back to your browser. Restart Firefox after this just for good measure.
Results:
Now when you go to an Experts Exchange link with blocked out answers, you will still see the blocked out answers and it may appear that this hack did nothing. Scroll down all the way to the end of the page and you will see the answers.
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6 Replies to "How To Hack Experts Exchanges In Two Steps"
University Update - Yahoo - How To Hack Experts Exchanges In Two Steps on August 23, 2007
[...] How To Hack Experts Exchanges In Two Steps » This Summary is from an article posted at Code and Coffee on Thursday, August 23, 2007 Experts [...]
Brandon on August 25, 2007
This is nice…but, why not tell people just to use the cached version from Google search. The answers are available there.
sara on August 26, 2007
This is GREAT to know. Thanks for pointing this out Matt. It really ticks me off when I end up on their site and they want me to join.
starman on September 7, 2007
maybe i’ll bite the bullet and pay the $12.95 subscription fee so I can post the question “how do i remove expertsexchange.com from google search results” hahaha
KoalaBeer on October 12, 2007
I actually wrote a letter to Experts Exchange asking how to block them from the Google results. Of course I didn’t get an answer. Now I know how.
Rob on August 23, 2007
Good tip…now I can actually search EE instead of searching google and using the google cache:
Click on the Google Cache link from the search results, and that will bring up the page with out the nasty overlays.