The real question is why does Google still put them on the first page? They've dispatched other nuisance sites but Quora still seems to get special treatment. Quora can't possibly have many inbound links to their content so why the high page rank?

Look at how long pinterest results have ranked highly in image search, even though they're completely useless. I just don't think Google cares to remove them, since surely they have known that pinterest should be excluded from image search results.

Google has some strange preferences. Forbes still dominates SERPs despite one of the worst user-experiences of any mainstream site. It's downright unusable without ad block

Forbes probably has an article for eeeeverything. It’s the e-how of news.

That is precisely the reason why.

IRL social networks. The guy who wrote the Quora algos probably has friends that work at Google who can influence the pagerank. I've seen these kinds of interactions first hand at various events in Seattle-Bellevue around 2014-2016. Only recently has it died down (mainly because the meetup groups either fizzled out or stopped offering free beer).

They stopped the free beer? No wonder they fizzled out.

You forgot “I don't know why you ask for an open-source app, but here are a couple of free ones laden with cancer-inducing ads.”

Dead on, though I can't remember when experts-exchange wasn't garbage, even before they added the hyphen (haha).

Long ago I was a consultant for a large church. One of their IT guys got a call from the pastor, who was worried about being hacked... The IT guy had been working on the desktop and had left up a browser window. The pastor read the URL as ExpertSexChange...

Around 1997 or so, I got called into a meeting with my boss, director, and head of IT security. I worked night shift in a wafer fab, and someone was accessing the computers in the office, and visiting inappropriate sites at night (that their new sophisticated monitor found). I was young, and into computers, I guess they assumed it was me. I pointed out that I didn't have a keycard that gave me access to the office area, so it couldn't be me, asked if they checked it. While they were quickly apologizing, I asked what site they accessed.

www.excite.com

The look on their faces when I suggested they actually verify the site before firing whoever it was.....

I remember seeing a news story back in 1995 about how content for the current Super Bowl (Super Bowl XXX) was being blocked by parental filters because it assumed 'XXX' was adult content.

What kind of content could there have been then for the superbowl: Blinking tags and daily updated grey-background text? Are you sure parental filters really were a thing in 1995. I remember 1995. I was using mosaic.

I had a similar experience during school. One real life troll told a substitute teacher I was accessing porn sites. Teaching sub only looked at the website url before kicking me off the computer. Unfortunately there was no follow-up for me to call them out on being lazy/ignorant. Funny thing was the "troll" did get banned later for accessing porn sites on the school network.

How dare someone be excited!

I used to have an excite.com email.

Can't forget the susanalbumparty: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/cbd0fd47-3f92-494e-81...

You used to be able to discretely order high quality low cost ink writing implements from a piece of land surrounded by water at "PenIsland".

Edit: I'm glad to see they're still up and working hard to service customers at: http://www.penisland.net (totally safe for work, trust me)

Q: Can I provide my own wood?

A: In most cases we can handle your wood.

That’s either impressive levels of deadpan, utter inability to notice the double entendre, or and impressive job of “leaning into the joke”.

The whole site's a joke, it doesn't actually sell pens.

If it's "clean [and] free of parasites".

I mean, if I was going to have that kind of surgery I'd definitely be looking for an expert. You put a regular cosmetic surgeon in there and you risk having no wrinkles on things that should have wrinkles and other such catastrophes. All this to say maybe they missed an opportunity when they ditched that domain. ;)

> Many dark patterns including forcing people to login to read content.

I remember I used to have to log in to read content back in 2013ish, but I don't have to do so right now.

Only if you come from Google.

bullshit.ly - Libya - Domain Available

OK just give me a second..