Are you serious about Quora? I'm going to go with no.[1] With the text blurring and desperate requests for Facebook signin details Quora is basically expertsexchange for SV insiders now.
Given the text blurring is a form of cloaking (showing one thing to the search engine, nothing to people who come in from a search) I think search engines should viciously rank them down too. And I don't care if there is some "easy" way to get around the blur (like the "scroll down" for expertsexchange or whatever it was), it's not obvious and it just pollutes the search results. Get rid of it. That said, as was mentioned elsewhere on HN recently, Stackoverflow needs a place for more meta questions to be moved rather than deleted as you can occasionally get a useful one that isn't just rehashing things we've seen 1000 times.
In Quora's case the text blurring applies both to search engines and users. I've visited the site as the googlebot user agent and it is exactly the same as what non-logged in users see. They also aren't doing any tricks to hide the full response in the HTML.
Also FYI, most major search engines have "secret" IPs from which they crawl websites using normal user agents (ex: Chrome, Firefox, etc). They then compare the results to the results from their main crawlers to detect the type of cloaking you referred to.
> I've visited the site as the googlebot user agent and it is exactly the same as what non-logged in users see
.. except, of course, that the googlebot just reads the HTML. The CSS3 blur only causes problems when you try to read the site visually, via a browser.
> They also aren't doing any tricks to hide the full response in the HTML.
Yes, that's why the googlebot can read it.
I don't know why you're bothering to argue that this isn't cloaking. It most assuredly is.
I guess I should be clearer. The full responses aren't in the HTML at all. The blur effect is just images. Neither you or google see the full responses
Quora may be blurring things for both googlebot and users but it still does not excuse the fact that they are deliberately obscuring content for non-logged in users. So in this respect, they are no better than expertsexchange except maybe a less unfortunate name.
I just when back and checked, it's a png of blurred text so it isn't really cloaking. Google presumably can't see that text but it gets indexed from the question, the first answer and the first words of the other answers though. Either way it's a page that's mostly useless getting indexed. Are the results higher because Google thinks a series of images surrounded by relevant text probably have relevant content? Are the results higher from the days when they didn't blur and got a half decent page rank (all those links still pointing at them)? I think Google recalculates fairly frequently, and I personally haven't seen as much Quora in my searches - but it's hard to escape personalisation see the DuckDuckGo experiment - so maybe they are on the decline. That's another argument against them being a one billion dollar company though.
The same is true for me, I will continue to buy Intel CPUs and motherboards, for both desktop and mobile, until someone else takes open source graphics drivers as seriously as they do.
This has been a major pain point for the Linux community since the Radeon days. It's such a shame, because ATI had a huge opportunity to steal that market from nVidia back then. Instead, maximizing value away from users and toward shareholders left us with a video-diminished Linux community.
Given how many thousands of dollars we steered to Intel because of it, I'm not sure this maximized shareholder value either. Few things businesses do are actually big-picture decisions.
I'm fairly technical, I do a reasonable amount of programming and I've been using various flavours of Linux for well over a decade, but installing vanilla Android on a phone where the manufacturer doesn't support it is just ridiculous. There was a time when I'd be fine to issue endless arcane commands during an install process, or I wouldn't mind manually partitioning my drive and setting mount points, or getting stuck into some X config file to try out some new window manger etc., but now I just want things to work. And that's if you are supported by CyanogenMod, if you aren't it's just a recipe involving random .exe files from "HaKerD00dz" with animated gif avatars from some PHP forum that you have to trust. It's a total mess.
The android OS ecosystem is totally broken on this level by the carriers who have every interest in making the higher cost phones more attractive by not updating the Android version on lower cost phones and not updating the version for existing customers. This issue is exactly why Linus' rant resonated with people and Engadget's position attracted so much fire. Nobody should be on an old version of Android. I've got my phone up to Android 4.0 after a stupid custom process from the manufacturer (which only ran on Windows) but I am fairly certain it's the last official update I will see for it even though it's more than capable of running newer versions. However, unless I can get a source more reliable than some php forum for updating it myself I am unlikely to update outside of this manufacturer version.
I really hope Google's Nexus intervention clears up this issue and finally turns the telcos into dumb pipes, but I am afraid it will only make the carriers offer an up-to-date Android on sale, which then won't be updated later. This is why the ecosystem for installing vanilla Android needs to be seriously improved and Google needs to step up to their responsibilities to provide automatic updating to carriers or a really properly supported community for mods.
> who have every interest in making the higher cost phones more attractive by not updating the Android version on lower cost phones
You'd be better to attribute that to them being under-resourced to deliver software updates to all models of phones immediately. They focus on shipping to the high end phones first -- those customers have paid more for that support. Some low end devices just never get to the top of the priority list.
If you want upgrades, buy the best phone you can. If you are buying low end, you have to realise that it's essentially locked to the version that it ships with.
That's my take on it anyway. I don't have any inside information.
I would argue your post and its tone - "no one who isn't a jerk would say this" - is far more offensive than pointing out that getting charts into email isn't exactly a massive victory for mankind. Pointing out that this post is also self-promotion doesn't hurt either given we see tons of extremely thin blog posts make it to the front page here which are basically adverts for the company of the blogger.
With Geoffrey Hinton involved as a supervisor I expect they were on the bleeding edge for other reasons anyway and just decided to scoop up some extra cash as well. I've not looked closely but Kaggle does seem to be a little like 99designs though.
In these there is obviously some contest going on between fuzzy classifiers, as there is in conceptual association games, misinterpretations of song lyrics between people and errors like the Freudian slip. There are at least large parts of our brains that seem to operate in this manner.
That said our use of logic and reason certainly says there is a part of our brain that works in a non-fuzzy way, or at least can be trained to work like. However, while there are people who understand the odds and are just there for a good time, it's instructive to go to a Casino and see how many people believe they can win and believe in lucky charms.
This topic is a minefield of semantic games with hidden assumptions and people arguing across each other though.
This is the second time I've seen astro-turfing on HN in as many weeks. On the following thread there were hilariously bad (registered within the hour, first comment on the product "wow great!") fake accounts.
While I have sympathy with your point, I haven't seen evidence is that Google is subsidizing (as I think Amazon is) rather than just selling at cost. The reason this is an important distinction is that it highlights how much the other handset makers, especially Apple, have been gouging their customers.
Google's disconnect from the hardware also shows how you actually can have performance on older hardware - apparently the new real-time Google Voice is on older iOS devices that Apple said couldn't handle Siri - if you don't have an interest in the upgrade cycle.
I wince a little at calling it price gouging. It's true that over the long term prices should be near marginal cost of production. But these are short term products. They need to cover their R&D costs. Costs that come with a risk that needs to be covered too. I feel a little milked when I buy a mac and kind of annoyed because I don't feel like I have an alternative (This is obviously an illusion. I don't like Windows or Linux personally, but they are both very reasonable alternatives). But macs are much older and they are still getting better (but not cheaper aargh!) ever year.
On tablets and phone, these high profits have been driving wonderful innovation bringing us better devices at lower prices every year. It's not like we're getting overcharged for stagnant products. This December's devices would have been an incredible last year.
Price gouging implies overcharging on essential items because the consumer has no choice. The only power Apple have over their consumers is that they really really want the stuff Apple makes, right now.
Any time Google (or any other major corporation) sells hardware at under a 20% margin, they are subsidizing their sales with revenue profit from other divisions, or the future potential of profit. It's important to note that you need to cover R&D, G&A, Marketing, etc... beyond that marginal cost. The exception would be in situations where you could make up the lost margin in huge volume (commodity sales, wholesaling, retailing other people's product). Google's average margin from other units of their business is 30%+, so it would make sense for them to invest in those business lines, unless their are some strategic reasons to focus on the tablet market - which, I'm sure, we all recognize there is.
To put it more clearly - Google is not selling tablets to make a profit on hardware. They are selling tablets so they can profit from search/advertising through those tablets.
Re: Google Voice on older IOS equipment. I installed it on my iPhone 4 today - it runs significantly faster than Siri on an iPhone 4S. Search results are instant, as well. Completely agree with you that this is an example of where the disconnect from hardware greatly benefits the consumer.
