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I've recently been desperately searching for "Hello World" programs for a particular product, and I keep getting SO results that are irrelevant, near the top of my search.

I've just realize that this is because SO has this greeting on many pages...

Hello World! Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited....

Now, if SO were a less honourable site, I would think this is a deliberate attempt at search engine manipulation, but I don't think SO is that kind of site.

Please ensure that "hello world" only comes from user posts.

[Edit] OK, it looks as if simple "hello world sharepoint web part" is not misdirected.

Try this... '"hello world" sharepoint webpart deploy render'.

An irrelevant SO entry is #4 on the first page. This has been the general direction of my searches - searching increasingly narrowly, for something that was causing me a lot of grief. My impression was that I was getting a lot of these irrelevant SO results, but the impression was wrong.

OK, it's not a general problem, except that "hello world" can be the most difficult thing in some narrow cases, which can lead to this misdirection.

BTW - when has "-1" been used to say "disagree".

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  • 3
    I like having a greeting, and I think it would be wrong to remove it.
    – Tyler Carter
    Commented Feb 12, 2010 at 23:57
  • 8
    -1 has always meant "I disagree" on meta, since it's a discussion site for issues and proposed features as much as a Q&A site for getting assistance with SO usability.
    – Ether
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:40
  • The hello world you're seeing doesn't come from SO's header but from a user's code. Nothing they can do about it...
    – Loïc Wolff
    Commented May 31, 2010 at 20:06
  • I hope google searches for "hello world sharepoint" link to this post just for the irony.
    – Mark Byers
    Commented May 31, 2010 at 20:23

8 Answers 8

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"Hello, World" is probably one of the most common programming phrases in existence. So, naturally, if you search for that term, you're very like to get the world's largest programming site.

Who else, other than programmers, are searching for "Hello World"?

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  • My point is that I was looking for a specific "Hello World" for a specific, difficult problem, so getting an irrelevant SO hit was annoying.
    – Javaman59
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:33
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    Luckily, they invented the scollbar for that.
    – ceejayoz
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 4:18
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I can't repro this. What search terms are you using?

I've tried 4-5 different things with "hello world" and I can't get any SO results.

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  • neither can I. I tried after I posted my answer and unfortunately, SO is not even in the first page for me. That's sad :(
    – mmx
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:05
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    Me, too. Tried the search after I posted my answer. How embarrassing. Now I think the problem is that StackOverflow doesn't come up when you search "Hello World".
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:11
  • I was successful in bringing Stack Overflow up by searching the correct term :) google.com/… I wonder if Google understands the correlation between recursive functions and stack overflow or it's just a pure text based match.
    – mmx
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:16
  • Thankyou. You've clarified it. My response is in the edit's to my post.
    – Javaman59
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:37
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I've recently been desperately searching for "Hello World" programs for a particular product...

Post a question on Stack Overflow asking for hello-world programs for this product. Someone will find at least one and post a good answer.

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I'm not sure if that's intentional (from SEO perspective) or not but it's a great thing in my opinion as it can attract a bunch of people from search engines to SO.

You can use the Stack Overflow built in search instead for this specific case to search within the [sharepoint] tag.

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I've recently been desperately searching for info on Stack Overflows, and I keep getting SO results that are irrelevant, near the top of my search.

Now, if SO were a less honourable site, I would think this is a deliberate attempt at search engine manipulation, but I don't think SO is that kind of site.

On a more serious note, your request sounds a bit silly. Are you writing to everyone who runs a site that turns up in your results?

Why not simply search for 

Hello World -Stackoverflow

and be done with it?

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I just did the following search in the three main search engines:

Hello World site:stackoverflow.com
[ Google | Bing | Yahoo ]

Not once I have fallen on a link not related to a user question. They are all links to user questions containing the words hello world (at the exception of Yahoo which added a bunch of links from sub-sites). Unless you post the exact query you used to get your results, I'm ready to dismiss this as pure fiction.

I think the issue at hand here is that your product is not very well know. It is therefore not the fault of SO per se, but of the product authors/maintainers.

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  • Thankyou. I've given a general answer in the edit to the queston.
    – Javaman59
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:41
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I can't duplicate this, but even if I could and it were a problem, I would just use the -site: prefix to exclude results from that location:

hello world sharepoint web part -site:stackoverflow.com

Just as site: limits search to a particular domain and -keyword excludes a certain keyword from the search results, so does the combination -site: exclude results from a particular domain.

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I've recently been desperately searching for "Hello World" programs for a particular product, and I keep getting SO results that are irrelevant, near the top of my search.

1) What product?

1a) What product's documentation is so poor that you need to Google for a Hello World?

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  • I removed the name of the product because I didn't want "hello world sharepoint" directing here.
    – Javaman59
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 0:39

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