Bypassing Expert-Exchange Without Hack
As a developer, I hate Expert-Exchange. It is really annoying searching for something that you need an answer to only to find out that there is a site like Expert-Exchange that has it, but won’t give it away for free. Technically Expert-Exchange does give their answers out for free, but just not to you and me. They give their answers to Google, and that is how Google ranks them so high on a particular topic. If Google’s search engine bot saw the same junk we see when we goto the site, it wouldn’t get ranked very high. To see what Google sees you have to view the text of Google’s cached page. Just viewing the cached page won’t work because they have javascript that is loaded that masks the answers. To view the text of the cached page follow these instructions.
Whenever you see an Expert-Exchange url, simply click on the Cached link instead of the link for the title.
After that click on the “cached text” link. If you scroll down to the bottom of the text you’ll see all the answers in all their glory.
March 19th, 2008 at 5:54 am
Just scroll down to the very bottom of the page and you’ll see the responses and answers to the question. Clear your cookies before doing another search on Experts Exchange and you’ll continue getting free answers there.
May 4th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Nice find, I had similar thoughts about E-E too
May 8th, 2008 at 8:24 am
That’s an interesting idea. I wonder how many other sites there are out there don’t block users but not bots? I bet there are plenty of sites that can be viewed through the cache.
May 26th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Thanks, you show what a monkey wants……………………
June 25th, 2008 at 8:04 am
While I agree with you that its annoying I am wondering what you would say if your boss wanted you to work for free? Lets hope that when you create a business or create the next google for yourself someone wont find a way to hack your app and let everyone just take it for free
June 25th, 2008 at 11:39 am
It’s not a hack.. it is called “using google”. There are so many people out there that just don’t know how to leverage google to its full potential.
July 6th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Ron, I don’t now what you do but I work for a legitimate company and try to maintain some level of integrity. I use, and pay for, legitimate support sites. Expert Exchange is not a legitimate company. They try to trick people into going to their site. They certainly waste a lot of my time. Just because you are doing something for a living doesn’t make it right.
August 1st, 2008 at 8:32 am
Thats not google, thats firefox!
When you use firefox just scroll down to the bottom of the page and there it is
August 1st, 2008 at 10:45 pm
It is google, they have changed their header since then.
August 19th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Some people seem to be really dumb and not read the comments properly.
You don’t need Google cache to view EE answers. Just scroll down past all the encrypted responses, then past the ads blocks/nav links and then you will see all the responses in their unencrypted glory.
Not sure why EE does this – guess they get the dumbies to subscribe. Smart people get the answers for free.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Expert Exchange has recently changed their website. Before they would try to obfuscate everything but the question. Now they obfuscate only the solution. All the answers are visible, but not the solution. So you still need Google’s cache if you want to view the solution.
September 24th, 2008 at 8:19 am
This doesn’t really work anymore. E-E figured out how to block out the expert answers…
January 4th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Thanks for great blog
March 4th, 2009 at 10:34 am
this is not working
June 8th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Hah, I accidentally found this out a while ago. I clicked on “Cached” by mistake and I’ve been using it ever since. Can’t believe I never thought of doing it before.