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by brandall10 4666 days ago
Wholeheartedly agree about the "feels like it has been around forever", which to me is the mark of a product which has changed the game. I simply can't recall what life was like before it. Conservatively speaking, I'm probably a good 2-3x as productive as I was pre SO.
2 comments

The only Q&A I can recall before StackOverflow was finding answers on a message board _or_ finding the answers hidden behind a pay-wall. (e.g: ExpertsExchange, which I believe has been around since the 90s.)

StackOverflow was definitely a game-changer.

the EE answers were never really behind a paywall, simply they were so hidden at the bottom of the page that a normal user did had the idea to scroll fully. After all, they needed to present the information to the google bot.
Did you ever try passing one of those links to a colleague? They were doing some referrer-checking at one point - if you weren't coming from Google, you didn't get the answer.
Oh really, I had no idea they were doing this. Any idea why?
They did that for a while, but Google implemented a policy that what gets shown to the Googlebot has to be the same as what a user would actually see. EE got delisted from Google for violating that policy, and ever since then, they have the answer way at the bottom of the page no matter what.
Actually, no.

Click through to this recently answered question from Google's search results[1] and scroll down to see the answer. Then open the resulting link[2] in an incognito tab and poof no answer

[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=experts+exchange+%22Troubl...

[2]: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Script...

Too bad Google doesn't care anymore, or else they'd do the same to Quora.
That had been Google's policy for some time, they just started enforcing it for a while. IIRC it was around the same time BMW and a couple of other big names were temporarily de-listed for keyword stuffing and similar shenanigans.
Why did they do that? To make the site less useful unless you'd paid up. i.e. "to encourage you to pay".
Because Google wouldn't list them unless clicking the link revealed the answer, I believe.
I used to visit DreamInCode.net for my question/answer needs.