The odds are pretty good that you’ve come across the Experts Exchange site while trying to troubleshoot some sort of problem. You probably got frustrated when you noticed that the question being asked was visible, but you couldn’t find the answers without registering first. That may not be a big deal if registering was free, but they actually charge $13 a month to get an account.
The good news is that you don’t have to pay just to see the answers. Experts Exchange obviously wants search engines to be able to see both the question and answers so that they can get a better ranking. Google, for example, forbids that a site show different content to their crawler than what the user sees. So Experts Exchange had to figure out a workaround.
What they ended up doing is checking to see if a user is coming from a search engine like Google using referrer information provided by your browser. If that’s the case the solutions are indeed displayed on the page, but you just have to scroll all the way down to see them. Here’s what I’m talking about…
You’ll see the question just as you’d expect:
If you scroll a little farther you should see the hidden answers/solutions, followed by a long list of categories:
After you scroll past the categories you should see all of the answers/solutions:
Now there’s a catch. If you try linking directly to an article you won’t see the solutions. Experts Exchange is specifically looking for the referral information in your browser to ensure that you’re coming from a search engine. That’s why this will work if you click the first link in these Google search results, but won’t if you try to jump directly to the article by clicking this link. Similarly this won’t work if your browser is set to hide the referrer information from websites.
So there you have it. You can view the answers from Experts Exchange without needing to register, and you don’t have to try to use a cached version of the page.
Thanks to Michael and Cory for giving me the idea to write this article!
What Experts Exchange is doing is called cloaking.
Cloaking
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.
[google.com]
Or you could just sign up as an expert for free. That’s what I did.
well, thank you
… now they are likely to “fix” this wonderful workaround 
..and me for finding out what was going, together with you?
Good to know that it *is* possible to read the solutions on this site. I wonder how many people actually pay for access.. it seems to be quite a popular site.
The expert signup workaround will never be fixed though. That’s because EE relies on them to provide answers.
Yo can also use Firefox, download Greasemonkey, and get one of the many user scripts that automatically hide the rubbish and only shows the answers, again as long as you search from Google.
*You*
Where is the edit button? haha.
They were once nailed for that by Google, and this was their workaround. They aren’t showing different content as long as you are coming from the search engine.
Doubtful. That would hurt their Google ranking if they did that.
Very nice! It didn’t even cross my mind to look for a Greasemonkey script to clean up the page.
I thought this article seemed familiar! Hehehe
I guess the question begs though, is Experts Exchange answers that good that it warrants all these work arounds? There’s always loads of other sites that have great tech solutions. Good tips, though…thanks. never knew about the scroll.
Not always, but I’d say that sometimes they are definitely worth it. There are definitely some smart people on their answering questions.
Seems this changed over this past weekend. No more scroll down…
Works fine for me..
Just sign up for an expert account. It doesn’t cost you anything and it’s a lot less hassle.