Developers are chatty, and we have about a million different forums, blogs, wikis, example sites, source projects, etc. When I'm having a problem with my code, chances are that there have been many other programmers that have already found a solution, and some of them probably posted answers online somewhere.
But, in any given search, you are bound to get at least a few links to this place called "Experts Exchange".
Note: I'm not linking to Experts Exchange... this is deliberate...
Nothing about the text of the google result will stand out as being an Experts Exchange related site... it'll just have a reasonable title and an excerpt that suggests it as a good place to look.
So I click the link.
And then I see the Experts Exchange page.
... and then I just want to fucking KILL the bastards that run this fucking sham of a site!!!
The idea of Experts Exchange itself isn't so bad. A subscription based community of IT professionals working together to create a database of answers to IT related issues.
No problem in theory...
In practice though, they gimmick the big search engines like Google into returning their pages knowing that those answers are NOT going to be on the page when the user follows the link. This technique is called 'cloaking', and I am annoyed that Google doesn't remove experts exchange from their indexes for such a blatantly deceptive tactic.
The trick is against Google's own guidelines even.
My second problem is that the quality of the actual answers on experts exchange is retardedly bad. Certainly not worth paying a monthly subscription fee.
But what annoys me most is just how much of my time I've wasted having to back-track after falling for yet another worthless experts exchange link. It happens at least two or three times a day... sometimes more.
And it gets old... really old...
If I ever do finally go postal, then I'll be stopping by the offices of Experts Exchange pretty early in the tour...
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