Stack Overflow ranks #2 for Google Search for "Stack Overflow"

Looks like it's a cut/paste error. If you do wget www.doioig.gov, this is the page you get. Notice the meta refresh that points to stackoverflow.com.<p><pre><code> &#60;!DOCTYPE HTML&#62; &#60;html lang="en-US"&#62; &#60;head&#62; &#60;meta charset="UTF-8"&#62; &#60;meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://stackoverflow.com"&#62; &#60;script language="javascript"&#62; window.location.href = "http://www.doi.gov/oig/index.cfm" &#60;/script&#62; &#60;title&#62;Page Redirection&#60;/title&#62; &#60;/head&#62; &#60;body&#62; If you are not redirected automatically, please click the link to continue to the &#60;a href='http://www.doi.gov/oig/index.cfm'&#62;U.S. Department of the Interior Office of Inspector General.&#60;/a&#62; &#60;/body&#62; &#60;/html&#62;</code></pre>

Given that the Department of Interior has been forced to take the whole department (expect for vital services) offline multiple times, I would not be surprised if it were hacked. I am hoping this doesn't get in front of a judge anytime soon as it can have some consequence for people caught in the way.<p>One such consequence, at one point a judge (curse his or her soul) decided since the DOI needed to be off the internet then all "affiliates" needed to be off the internet. This includes the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs). Which included both the .gov and .edu domain. At the time many Tribally chartered Community Colleges[1] were told to disconnect from the internet mid-semester. Even those colleges who paid for their own internet connection and had a .edu domain of their own.<p>Imagine having two weeks with no internet (most of our students don't have home internet) with classes going on. Finally, someone got the order rescinded for the schools.<p>I am not very fond of how the DOI handles its internet[2][3].<p>1) accredited just like state or private colleges with transferable classes.<p>2) don't even get me started about sending mail from a subdomain with no DNS entry for the sending mail server or subdomain and expecting us to not reject it.<p>3) <a href="http://www.doi.gov/archive/news/08_News_Releases/080523a.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.doi.gov/archive/news/08_News_Releases/080523a.htm...</a>

Google's algorithm has gotten so big and so complicated over the years, that there are so many cracks and special cases that can cause sites to disappear from or be poorly ranked in search results, unless you're lucky enough to be huge in the tech scene or post here and get your comment seen by a Googler (as I have on occasion).<p>&#60;plea&#62;Any Googlers reading this, I'm looking into rebuttals of false DMCA requests being ignored by Google for months...&#60;/plea&#62;

Conversation from three days ago at <a href="http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/169405/google-indexing-issue-for-keyword-stackoverflow" rel="nofollow">http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/169405/google-indexi...</a> suggests that the best hypothesis is that at some point in the past, www.doioig.gov was compromised and maybe redirected to StackOverflow.<p>(This hypothesis is supported by a Google cache of doioig.gov showing the message "Due to security concerns, our website will be unavailable until transition to the Department of the Interior web domain occurs. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and are working to speed up the transition. The following contact information is provided to assist you.")

Everyone seems to be focusing on the .gov site but if you take a look at the Stack Overflow home page, the page that would normally get indexed highly, there is very little telling Google what it is.<p>There is no &#60;meta name="description"&#62; tag in the header. The H1 tag, important to Google, says "Top Questions". The content of the first page constantly changes.<p>Plus, I would bet that most of the links into Stack Overflow are to individual articles, not the home page. Any particular article probably doesn't outrank a popular .gov site.<p>This is just very poor SEO on Stack Overflow's part.

<p><pre><code> https://www.google.com/search?q=stackoverflow&#38;aq=0&#38;oq=stackover&#38;aqs=chrome.0.0j5j57j0j62.3537&#38;sourceid=chrome&#38;ie=UTF-8#hl=en&#38;safe=off&#38;sclient=psy-ab&#38;q=stack+overflow&#38;oq=stack+overflow&#38;gs_l=serp.3..0l4.4882.4882.0.5337.1.1.0.0.0.0.135.135.0j1.1.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.5.psy-ab.gWmJt4vWzvg&#38;pbx=1&#38;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&#38;bvm=bv.43148975,d.dmQ&#38;fp=c1794afd088c3d78&#38;biw=1440&#38;bih=795 </code></pre> isn't that too long just for<p><pre><code> https://www.google.com/search?q=stackoverflow</code></pre>

I'm suspiciously seeing, "2,643 people +1'd this."<p>While I would be excited to see such enthusiasm relating to a government property, this doesn't smell kosher.

Stack Overflow ranks #1 for Bing Search for "Stack Overflow".

Not sure if they fixed it since this post went live on HN but I am not seeing that.<p>For me SO is first with six "breakout" links below it, and then wikipedia entry about it.<p>But I don't allow javascript or cookies on google search which may get me a less filtered result.

Gotta wonder though: should StackOverflow.com rank high for "stack overflow"? After all, a "stack overflow" isn't necessarily related to programming questions. Yes, you can ask questions on StackOverflow.com about stack overflows, but that's missing the point. So if I have a domain name that's a thing, but my site has very little content related to that thing, should I rank high for queries about that thing?

May be <i>someone</i> fixed <i>something</i>, but I'm seeing stackoverflow as the top result now for both with or without inverted commas.

The preferred .gov page has thousands of google plus likes. This seems like a fascinating example of google plus' terrible impact on google search and perhaps google corp.

What doesn't make sense is why it's ranked beneath a Government site? www.doioig.gov<p>Plus, the content of the homepage doesn't even contain anything about Stack Overflow.

Google thinks doioig.gov is StackOverflow.com. See what happens when you do a search for info: <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=info:stackoverflow.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=info:stackoverflow.com</a><p>Note what site shows up as the result and for the links for "similar" and "link to".

The power of .gov backlinks.

Something strange happened here. Google displays `stackoverflow.com` content in `doioig.gov` description. For example I can see `careers 2.0` in the description of `doioig.gov` that really doesn't have.

I don't see the Stack Overflow home page at all in my search results. <a href="http://imgur.com/3WHKhGv" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/3WHKhGv</a><p>Second link is the login page

Well actually, "stack overflow" should ideally refer to the programming error. The site being talked about is "StackOverflow", and if that term is queried in any search engine, it should, and will provide the correct result.

The Wikipedia description of a stack overflow should probably be the best link and it ranks 5th.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_overflow" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_overflow</a>

It's #3 if you use quotes <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Stack+Overflow%22" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Stack+Overflow%22</a> (wikipedia is #2)

The power of a .gov domain authority in google's algorithms.

Aaaaaaand, looks like it's back to normal. :)<p><a href="http://googl.com/#q=stack+overflow" rel="nofollow">http://googl.com/#q=stack+overflow</a>

Victory for Bing!

Unfortunately our plan for disrupting the Inspector General market got leaked a bit early.

This may be well the first time in my life I'm able to see a bug in Google Search.

doioig.gov ranks highly for both "stack" and "overflow" separately. That site is about stacks and overflows afterall. Perhaps that's why combining the two gives it superpowers.

It's 3rd on google.co.uk, after www.doioig.gov and Wikipedia

It ranks 1, 2, 3 and 4 for me - in the same time.

Not any more...

I love how this post points out a problem and fixes it at the same time.