If I'm searching for a specific term, I want to see pages that are relevant to that term when I click the links, not pages that ask for my credit card and that may or may not (probably not) show me a relevant page after I've been charged.

Experts Exchange was a fairly decent site very long ago, but it sucks horribly now and has for years and has nobody to blame for their downfall but their own deceptive practices and lack of vision in terms of alternate revenue models.

I'm glad Stack Overflow is totally eating their lunch. Good riddance.

When I searched for a programming answer and EE came up, most times the questions and answers were relevant. I never opted to pay for the service, and I stopped clicking the links to EE because I didn't want to pay. However, that didn't mean they didn't have the relevant answer, and I just had to pay for it if I wanted it.

I don't find this deceptive, just a form of advertising.

It was good for the business maybe, but never -- not then and not now -- good for the user.

If they wanted advertising they could have bought google adwords and pointed it to the appropriate landing pages to buy the answers.

If they want free advertising, well TANSTAAFL.

It was more like:

"You know that flavor you desperately need? We've got it, and we'll show you the box, but if you want to taste it you'll have to pay."

Don't get me wrong - I hated EE and I'm glad to see them gone from Google, but I don't think they implied their content was free.

In fact, dpcan has managed to convince me that he's right. When I search for the title of a book, and I get to see a preview of a few pages, it is a form of advertising. It's not "wrong" or "mischievous" or "evil" or any other negative, it's just how advertising works.

The reason you are all upset is because that's not how Search Engines, in particular, worked. With book previews on Amazon, we're used to it. What EE did was try a new tactic, built for the web, to advertise their product. Of course we didn't like it - when has anyone ever liked paying for something?

Nowadays, what they do has been ruled to be wrong. The "rules of the game", as defined by Google (the authority here, apparently), say that they aren't allowed to do that. They find "tricky" ways of doing it, which sucks. But remember, these rules are being written live - you can't hold EE at fault for trying to "hack" a system, and you definitely can't fault them for not living up to rules that never existed.

There seems to be two different complaints about EE.

1. They show data to Google but hide it from visitors unless they pay. Personally I see nothing wrong with this as explained by edanm. They are a business and this is their business model. They use a search engine as a form of free advertisement. If the search engines didn't have a problem with this then I don't understand why potential visitors should. If you don't like having to pay for the content then go elsewhere. Having results in the search engine that have data behind a paywall is the problem of the search engine, not the site that has the paywall. The data is still relevant even though you can't see it immediately on clicking the link.

2. They show one set of data to search engines but show a different set to visitors. To me, this is a no-no as long as they are actually doing this in the described manner. If by showing different data is because of the paywall and they do match up after you pay, then I see no problem. But in the end if they do not match then there's a problem and I would hope that the search engines would discourage this type of thing.

I think people need to be more clear on what exactly they are complaining about.

Plus, as edanm states, you shouldn't down vote someone simply because the statement is unpopular yet relevant to the topic.

Are you saying that if your content is in Google's database it's required to be free? As a site owner, I have the right to decide whether or not my data is available for free, but it is there, and you should know it's there, so I have to somehow get found in search engines.

Think of it this way. You search for an image in Google - you are presented with sites that sell licenses to stock photos. Is this any different?

I want search engines to penalize sites that put content behind firewalls, because those sites are less relevant to me. If the site is good enough to overcome that penalty because the content is so good that it gets enough google juice anyway, awesome. But they should still be penalized for hiding stuff behind the paywall.

It's not a moral judgment on paywalling content, it's a practical one. As a search engine user, I don't want Google to show me paywall stuff unless it's really, really good. So Google is making the appropriate ranking by penalizing paywalled content. But if you trick Google by showing googlebot something that you don't show users, that's obviously deceptive. Which I will make a moral judgment on.

In theory they provide a service that has value, that is a platform where questions can get answered. Just because they didn't pay the "experts" doesn't mean their overall concept is not worth paying for.

Now, I'm not saying that their implementation is worth paying for, I just don't buy the idea that because they didn't pay for their data it's wrong for them to charge for their service.