[gldnspud]

Stack Overflow was created in response to a site that was doing something similar to what Quora is doing with search engines, except that site required a paid membership to see the answers. I recall one trick that people used before SO was around, which was to spoof the User-Agent to be GoogleBot. Doing so would show you the answer(s) to the question. :)

[bencollier49]

I thought Google specifically penalised sites which did that?

[Netminder_EE]

DISCLAIMER: I'm one of Experts Exchange's volunteer administrators.

Google penalized sites that redirected from SERPs or buried content below a lot of "sign up here" stuff very heavily; you can even make the case that it could have been called the "EE Penalty" instead of Panda, if only because Google's web search team (i.e. Matt Cutts) collaborated heavily with the Stack ownership in developing the algorithm changes and consequences.

That's not to excuse EE's management's behavior -- quite the contrary. From the perspective of longtime users, EE's string of decisions, the consequences of those decisions, and its reactions to those consequences starting not quite a decade ago nearly destroyed what had been a vibrant community.

If there's anything good to have come of it, it's that EE has finally moved -- about six or seven months ago -- to a business model that allows the non-member to see what members see: the entire question and solutions. Joining for free does have a few minor advantages; paying (either with a credit card or by answering questions) has more.

But it took a long time for EE to learn those lessons and begin to implement those fixes. Whether Quora will learn them is a whole 'nother story; like so many other sites, it built its systems and market-share without much thought given to how it was going to monetize.

EE made that mistake too, in 1997. Quora has a lot of money backing it up, so it can maintain its facade for a long time... but I wouldn't be placing any bets on it being around 15 years from now if it actually had to depend on income.

[eric_h]

I haven't seen an expertsexchange result come up in google in a long time.

[brandur]

At some point they switched to a slightly different model where you would see the normal obfuscated answers with a request to log in at the top of the page, but if you scrolled down far enough, the answers would be there in clear text.

They were certainly walking a very fine line, but Google seemed to give them a pass with this system for quite some time.