Daniweb vs others statistics?

[castajiz_2]

Just wondering how popular is Daniweb compared to other forums (if i may ask the question in this way)? If I type in google search anything that has to do with programming the first genereated result will be stackoverflow, i mean daniweb has a much more better design and organization and voting and marking threads solved ect... but the thing that beats daniweb is when you post a question at stackoverflow you get at least 3 decent responses in less than a minute. Do people at stackoverflow get paid for this stuff or do they do it voluntarily?
It would be nice if you could share your thoughts about my question.

[Dani]

StackOverflow dominates the search results because Google wants them to :) Google sends them more traffic than any other programming/IT site. Just the sheer volume of traffic they get from Google means more people around to answer questions, even if a smaller percentage of their audience participates. Other than SO, I don't know any other development forums that are more popular than DaniWeb.

[mike_2000_17]

I still remember the good old days (only a few years ago), when any given search on a devel problem would result in a number of results from different sites (forums and mailing-lists), and when SO and Daniweb were more or less as likely to hit on searches. Now, it seems that Google has somehow made sure that the top three to five search results are always for StackOverflow, regardless of how unrelated the threads are to the actual search terms. Very often, I find myself making a search, and almost automatically scroll down to the middle / end of the first page of results, because I so often find the first results to be irrelevant stuff (irrelevant to my question) from the "preferred sites". I'm seriously thinking finding an alternative search engine (I hear duckduckgo is not too bad, any other ideas?).

[Dani]

DuckDuckGo seems to be the only alternative nowadays. It originally was being used because it was promising no datamining and totally anonymous search, as opposed to Google. However, it seems more and more people are using it simply because of not liking the change Google has been making to their results lately.

[happygeek]

I use DDG for the anonymous searching, but also the fact that it's fast and relevant. Can't help but think Google will try and buy it, or rather employ the developer and close it as part of the employment contract. This has happened in the past with stuff that I have really liked (can't recall the name but there was an app that downloaded your gmail and provided a really good offline search facility some years back, Google offered the dev a job and then the app disappeared soon after).

[pritaeas]

I use it too. I like the way bangs work and the fact that you don't have to click "next page", but just scroll down.

[hettyhetty]

They paid google. I think. haha

[Msanches]

I like sitepoint.com
They'be been around longer than this site and are still very good at answering programming questions. The also publish nice tutorials all the time.

[Dani]

Sitepoint has really great tutorials and their community has a lot of php do-it-yourself'ers. However, even their PHP forum, which is the largest forum they have by a magnitude of 10X, is not as active as our PHP forum is ... and PHP isn't even our biggest forum! The thing with their tutorials is that they self-publish them into for-profit eBooks and even print publications which contributes to a good revenue stream for them, so they can afford to hire top notch authors to write the tutorials because there's a direct return on their investment there. Their forums are a different beast entirely.

In my opinion google is more of a hassle to use than just going to the library and finding books on the subject. Plus reading books is better on your eyes.