Dan East

Experts-Exchange is a website where people pose questions they require a solution to. Questions are usually of a technical nature, and have to do with topics like software development, website design, and other similar areas. In turn, “experts” will proffer up answers which the asker may accept or ignore. If a solution is accepted, the asker is charged points, and conversely, the person providing the answer is awarded points. Moderators may force acceptance of a solution if they deem it sufficiently answered the question.

I have never formally used Experts-Exchange, in that I have submitted neither questions nor answers. However, in my searching during a typical workday I will usually encounter Google search results referencing Experts-Exchange. I normally avoid these results for a number of reasons. Questions do not always have good answers; often people post haphazard answers just to earn potential points. In fact, questions may not have any answers at all. But most importantly, Experts-Exchange will not show you the text of the answers. So even though someone already paid points (often via real cash) to have the question answered, they expect every other person to also pay (not points but hard cash) for a Premium Account to see those “solutions”. This is rather unfair, considering that the “experts” that provided solutions do not even get reimbursed points for providing solutions to all these additional people, although the site itself receives actual monetary compensation for them.

So although I normally skip over results from Experts-Exchange, there are occasions when I am searching for something so obscure that I must look at all the results to find what I’m seeking. In that case I use a simple little trick to see what solutions were posted to Experts-Exchange – I use Google’s cache. You see, when Google’s web crawler bot visits Experts-Exchange, their website will display the full text of all answers to Google. That way all the text in those answers will be indexed by Google, which vastly increases the chances of seeing an Experts-Exchange page in the Google results. Google, in turn, saves a copy of each webpage it visits, which is called caching.

So if you are searching Google and come across results at Experts-Exchange that you want to view, simply click on the link that says “Cached” at the bottom of the search result, and you will see the full text of the page, answers included.