How To View Experts Exchange Solutions Without A Subscription
Experts exchange is a great resource with a couple annoying traits.
- It always ranks high when I'm googling my latest programming problem
- $99.95 / year subscription
- The solutions are always blurred out, despite the fact they the real solutions are indexed by google
This pissed me off. What they are doing is called cloaking, which is against Google's rules. Cloaking is serving one page to Google, and then different content to regular users. Google removes websites from their index that do this, as Matt Cutts states in his blog.
There are 2 solutions for this problem.
The first solution takes advantage of EE's attempts to not get banned from Google. They actually show the answers on the page only really, really far down. If you find a question and all the answers are blurred out, just scroll past all the blurred out answers, and then past the big "Experts Exchange Zones" block, to see the un-blurred answers. Try it out here. Remember to keep scrolling! The only problem with this is the page usually throws a cookie onto your machine that will hide the solutions on other EE pages. This leads us to solution 2.
Solution 2 fights fire with fire. By making EE think that we are the googlebot going in and looking at the pages, all the solutions will be fully shown to us. First, we start by changing the user-agent (the thing that identifies our browser). In Firefox, type about:config in the address bar.
You wil be presented with a bunch of preferences, their status, types, and values. In this window, right click and select new -> string and enter "general.useragent.override" with no quotes
Click ok, and you will get another textbox. In this textbox enter "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" and click ok.
Congrats, you are now Googlebot! One final thing to do is to either turn off cookies (tools -> options -> privacy) and uncheck "accept cookies from sites" or click exceptions and deny all cookies from "experts-exchange.com" This will not allow EE to place a cookie on your computer so you can always view the solutions. You will now have unrestricted access to Experts-Exchange and all the solutions.
This has to be one of the most useful articles I’ve found for a while, it’s always annoyed me that Experts Exchange expect you to pay for their ‘answers’. I’m adding this to Stumbleupon and passing it around to a couple of friends.
As it happens I found something on EE that I would have found most useful and was almost tempted to sign up for the trial account just to view the response, now I won’t have to, cheers
Glad I could help. I used to use experts exchange so much and sometimes had to rely on a Google cache of the page to read the answers :), this way is much better.
That’s a great tip. Thanks