Most Annoying Google Search Results? Empty Answer Sites

Remember a little back Matt Cutts of Google posted that he wanted the Google search results to remove empty review sites from the listings? Recently, during my Google searches, I have been landing on sites that have answers, but require you to login and pay to view those answers.

This has happened to me several times over the course of the week, but let me share one example with you. I was looking on how to mess around with imap outlook folders and found a Google result at, you guessed it, Expert Exchange. Here is a screen shot:

Great, this is my exact question, I click over and what do I see? I see a teaser to sign up to view the answer:

I cannot tell you have annoying this search experience has been for me. It makes me want to completely remove all expert-exchange.com results from my search experience at Google. I know this is not new, it comes up very often in the forums. But now it is bothering me personally, so I thought I take a recent thread and vent about it.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Update: As noted by Adam in the comments, if you actually keep scrolling and scrolling, you will see all the answers listed there. I assume they are doing this to not cloak content to Google, but it still seems wrong.

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posted rustybrick in Google Search Engine at July 9, 2009 8:43 AM Comments (8)

Comments

The answers are at the bottom if you scroll past all the crap.

Posted by Adam at July 9, 2009 09:21

Agreed, I hate expert exchange for that. To be fair good on them for trying maximise their exposure but it is bloody annoying as they show up for loads of techie related problems.

Posted by James at July 9, 2009 09:23

Wow, Adam, good eye. Still wrong imo.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at July 9, 2009 09:35

Actually, in my experience, scrolling down only reveals the answers in about 3 out 5 searches. At least 2 out of 5 still just show the "register for answer" banner. And this is definitely far too many.

Posted by Zebedee at July 9, 2009 11:34

And you used to be able to get around that by viewing the cached version as it seems they would show it to Googlebot for exposure, but they've changed that in the last year or so.

Posted by Lewis at July 9, 2009 13:22

This annoys me to no end as well. I was looking last night for a driver for my digital camera because the new Vista service pack seems to have borked it. Most of my search results were for sites cloaking the driver as a download for some spyware-ish driver-management software.

Posted by Chris at July 9, 2009 13:57

It would be nice if Google removed all the stub pages from major sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, and other "database" sites that are plugging up the search results.

Posted by Michael Martinez at July 9, 2009 16:28

I think it would be nice if Google had a "Don't ever show me this site again" - if they did, I'd click Experts Exchange for that immediately.

Perhaps if Google saw that thousands of us are disgusted by that site they'd de-rate it enough that nobody would have to waste their time with it.

I vote EE as "most annoying site ever"

Posted by Tony Lawrence at July 10, 2009 07:49

Most Annoying Google Search Results? Empty Answer Sites

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