Withdraw questions with no useful answers from Google index

Question

(Turning this answer into a feature request.)

Stack Overflow is a repository of great and not-so-great answers. Three major causes for the not-so-great is misleading question titles, outdated answers, and poorly-answered duplicates with no connection to a better original question.

Anecdotally, today, a new user who had arrived from Google posted this "not an answer" underneath a question of mine:

@Mewp - 2 years after you answered the question, I ended up here (via goggle) looking for a solution on mod rewrite and the tutorial site you linked to is GONE!! Now what?? [...] So annoying that this ranks so highly in google for a lot of technical searches but unfortunately the site is full of unhelpful answers!

While it can be debated whether that question should exist in the first place as it is a resource request, the issue is widespread and goes far beyond resource requests. As a solution, Stack Overflow should consider voluntarily withdrawing questions from the Google index that gather some form of negative feedback.

Ways to collect feedback could be:

• Ask the googlers. When a user comes in from Google, ask them something like

  We see you found this question while searching for how to flobber the gargle. Was it helpful and relevant to your query? Yes / No

  If a question receives too many "unhelpful" votes, either remove it from the Google index through robots.txt, or add it to an "unhelpful" review queue specialized on editing titles and such, or both.

• Use the existing anonymous feedback data (Jeff Atwood himself has indicated that anonymous feedback could be useful for the cause) and exclude questions from the index that get overwhelmingly bad feedback.

• When a user comes from Google, measure the time they spend on the page. If they leave it immediately with no action at all, interpret that as an "unhelpful" vote.

• Also, perhaps questions with two or more close votes (except of course duplicate votes) should be withdrawn from the Google index. That would go a long way towards cleaning the search results from trivial garbage, too.

Answer 1

Yeah, I hate this feeling when I'm looking for a solution to a problem for days. Finally, I manage to type a query into Google in such a way that SO pops out. I say to myself: got it! I'm very happy. Then I click the link only to see that I'm not the first one with this problem, and it's unanswered since like 1970. I'm very sad.

However, it makes me add the answer when I'll manage to find solution myself, like in this question from 2 years ago.

So although I've up-voted this proposal in the meantime I've managed to find a counterexample showing that unhelpful result from Google led to a good outcome :)

Sorry, after reading the comment under the bounty I see that I didn't answer the reason for the bounty directly. Hope that timestamps on the linked question and answer, and my assurance that it was found via Google are credible enough for this answer to be somewhat helpful ;)

Answer 2

Ways to collect feedback could be:

• Ask the googlers. When a user comes in from Google, ask them something like

We see you found this question while searching for how to flobber the gargle. Was it helpful and relevant to your query? Yes / No

If a question receives too many "unhelpful" votes, either remove it from the Google index through robots.txt, or add it to an "unhelpful" review queue specialized on editing titles and such, or both.

I can see a couple of potential problems with this solution.
I would guess that a great many people searching on Google are using search terms like:

"How to flobber the gargle?"

When in fact what they are really looking for is:

"How to flobber the gargle in this very specific context?"

And while the first post they find on Stack Overflow may be a perfect explanation of how to flobber the gargle, they don't know how to make it work in their specific use case, so they mark it as being unhelpful.

Likewise we are likely to see a lot of googlers who are searching for things that are a little over their heads. They are also likely to start out searching:

"How to flobber the gargle?"

But they don't yet know about flobbering or gargling, or how to use them properly, so reading a perfectly written post on how to flobber the gargle is beyond their understanding and so it isn't useful to them until they go back and read the documentation or search for:

"What is a flobber?"

and

"What is a gargle?"

We should't give anonymous googlers too much control over what appears in the search results because we don't want them to end up removing good content simply because they are frustrated at not having found a tailor made answer for their level of understanding and use case.

Answer 3

Problems:

• Confirmation that other people have my problem is often very useful to me.
• You seriously think I use SE's searches to tell if my question is a duplicate? Of course not. I use Google.
• I've answered questions I've tripped on a Google search too. Often after researching the solution myself.
• I've also added bounties to unanswered questions.
• Fewer people will visit SE. I don't see any way that can feasibly run with SE's business interests.

Putting this together, let's imagine the new workflow.

1. Google a question that appears on SE without answers.
2. It's not on SE.
3. Go to the address bar, type "stackexchange.com," and start to ask the question.
4. Probably half write it up, and see the useless question appear as a duplicate.
5. Route 1: Click on it in a moment of excitement!
6. THEN realize it has no answers.
7. Or route 2: Post it as a duplicate. (Sorry, I'm not writing a real flowchart in markdown.)

This is strictly worse. You get more time wasted in half the use cases and more duplicates in the other half.

"But we're just wasting time of people who would find the answer somewhere else."

Great. Then show them our unanswered question, and after they go find the answer somewhere else they will come back here and answer it. This is why SO is by far and wide the first place I will look for an answer over any other forum or Q&A site and about 90% of the time over the official documentation. And if they don't? Then sounds like we didn't really care about wasting their time in the first place.