6 ms·
I just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools
by westoque 9y ago
I just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools
- ungzd 9y agoIt already appears usually in higher positions than w3schools in Google, at least for me.
- talmand 9y agoI remember there was an effort to get related tech sites and blogs to reference MDN over W3Schools to attempt to get it higher in the search results.
- roselan 9y agoI installed "Personal Blocklist" extension exclusively for w3schools...
- randallsquared 9y agoMe, too. However, if your opinion on W3Schools is from ten years ago when they were sketchy and misleading, it may interest you to know that it's much better now. I don't reflexively hit the back button when I land there from a search, now -- sometimes the info I'm looking for is actually there. ;)
- vog 9y agoSame for RFCs. Let's search for "rfc 1855". The first item is indeed the original plain text source, unfortunately without links or anything: - https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt But the second hit is a third-party source, that doesn't provide much over the plain text version. It doesn't even contain the RFC contents directly. I can't imagine anyone seriously linked to that page, let alone that so many are doing it to push it to the second place: - https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1855 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1855 ... wtf?! Moreover, the RFC authors group itself, the IETF, already provides a beautiful HTML representation, with links and everything: - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 But you won't find that in the first 10 hits. Not even in the first 50 hits, for that matter. You will find it, however, if you click at the third item, which is the corresponding Wikipedia entry: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology The very first item in the "External links" section points to tools.ietf.org. Given the prominent low-quality links to w3schools, rfc-editor and so on, I'm asking myself if Google is actively harming Mozilla and IETF. Maybe not harming, but being ignorant. These issues are known for years. If they want to be the best possible search engine, why don't they do anything about these widely known issues? I understand that they'd rather fix their algorithms than adding special rules for IETF, but then, they should have analyzed their algorithms how they can be tricked by low-quality sites. And fix that. Meanwhile, years have passed and nothing changed. Maybe we should introduce a new search engine: "Second-Order Wikipedia" It would work like this: 1. Look up the search terms in Wikipedia articles 2. For each hit, show the Links of all articles' "External Links" sections.
- gpm 9y agoSame search on duckduckgo, first few results are (in order): - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 (html version) - ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt (text version) - rfc1855.net (another html version which is more readable than the ietf's) - datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1855/ (information about the history of the rfc) - https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1855 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1855 (useless) This is one of the clearest examples yet of why I prefer duckduckgo these days. Even if it might partially be just because less SEO is targeted at them.
- discreditable 9y agoOn DDG, you can use a bang search to directly get there too. Try: !rfc 1925
- iand 9y agorfc-editor.org is an IETF-run service and is the official permanent home for RFCs now. See https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7990 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7990
- vog 9y agoOuch! I would never have thought that this crappy site originates from the IETF itself. It doesn't even point to their beautiful (and fully inter-linked!) HTML versions.
- MrZeus 9y agoThat HTML RFC page is one of the few pages I've ever tested with PageSpeed (by Google) that gets 100/100 marks for Mobile and Desktop versions! https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftools.ietf.org%2Fhtml%2Frfc1855 https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
- nailer 9y agoI wish someone made a proper HTML RFC, with variable width characters for paragraphs for readability purposes and monospace for code (which should be easily detectable)
- parthdesai 9y agoi just add mdn at the end of my query.
- Kiro 9y agoAm I the only one who prefers W3Schools over MDN? It's much less cluttered and immediately gives me the example usage I'm looking for.
- chrshawkes 9y agoI find both to be very well done but MDN goes in depth the most.
- iand 9y agoThe problem has been that historically W3Schools has been inaccurate. MDN set out to fix that and be the best source. I don't know why W3Schools has so much SEO juice.
- Kiro 9y agoHistorically maybe but I don't think that's true nowadays.
- aviraldg 9y agoEven then, why would you support a closed, commercial, outdated website instead of MDN which is essentially a wiki?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Aldo_MX 9y agoThe same reason why beginners get a sentiment of attachment with websites like Stack Overflow. They're looking for "how to do <something>", not for the docs.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lucb1e 9y agoDepending on the topic, I often get MDN above w3schools. And adding mdn is not much of a bother.
- microcolonel 9y agoThey show up pretty high on DuckDuckGo. I think W3Fools has more traffic and more hyperlinks from the DHTML years.
- savanaly 9y agoI've just had to get into the habit of appending mdn to all my web development queries to make it show up at the top. Can't count the number of time's I've done the search "[some new array method] mdn". Invaluable website.
- GunlogAlm 9y agoSame. Maybe I'll make a point of not appending the "mdn" and just scrolling down until I find the MDN result, in the future.
- absove 9y agoIn firefox you can also add it as an alternative search engine.
- frandroid 9y agoYou can do that in pretty much every browser, and also add a search keyword (e.g. mdn), so you can do "mdn array" to search the MDN site for "array".
- RodericDay 9y agoIf DuckDuckGo is your default search engine, you can just do !mdn <search query> and get the MDN search results page. You can also do the same for stuff like !gweek <search query> And get google results limited to the last week (or StartPage ones if you swap the g for and s). It's amazing.
- lucideer 9y agoI could be imagining it, but in addition to the "instant answer" feature which uses MDN, DuckDuckGo's indexer also seems to give some priority to MDN over W3S in comparison to Google, in my experience. If W3S is first, MDN is usually second whereas it may be 5th/whatever in Google.
- aw3c2 9y agoAny reasonable web browser lets you assign keywords to searches. No need to go through a third-party.
- natmaster 9y agoGoogle sucks and you're complaining to Mozilla? I can't believe people have become so complacent with search they will start blaming great content on the internet for being hidden by shitty algorithms.