5 ms·
Same 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.ie
by vog 9y ago
Same 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)
- olau 9y agoFYI, to the best of my knowledge: - ietf.org/rfc/ <- this is a static version that IETF has - rfc-editor.org <- this is the RFC Editor's official site - I think you used to be able to download stuff through FTP, and the site looked like an FTP site until recently; in some sense this is really the canonical URL for RFCs which the RFC Editor publishes - tools.ietf.org/html/ <- this is mostly Henrik Levkowitz' work - he's working directly on datatracker.ietf.org and has for many years, I think there was a plan to have datatracker.ietf.org contain HTML versions but I don't know the status - datatracker.ietf.org <- this is the dynamic (Django-based) site that tracks lots of stuff about the working groups and meeting and documents - the source is open so you can look at it if you like - honestly I think this is the best place to link as it gives an increasing amount of context, although tools.ietf.org/html/ is definitely the nicest way to read the contents
- lenzm 9y agoIf your new search engine became popular, the incentive to spam Wikipedia would be enormous again. 10 years ago, Wikipedia decided to nofollow all links because of the spam for Google relevance: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-wikipedia-links-are-now-nofollow/4288/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-wikipedia-links-are-...