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I kind of hope they don't, or there is more to it than just that -- for example, a user coming back and clicking on something else counts as a downvote for the

I kind of hope they don't, or there is more to it than just that -- for example, a user coming back and clicking on something else counts as a downvote for the first item. Any system that ranks things purely based on votes or view counts can have a feedback loop that can amplify "bad" results that happen to get near the top for whatever reason. For web search, this would encourage results that look right from the results page, even if they're not actually a good result of what the user is looking for. An example of this would be when you're trying to find an answer to a specific question like "How do I do X when Y?". The best result I'd hope for is a page that answers the question (or a close enough question to be applicable), while the promising-looking-but-actually-bad result is a page where someone asks the exact same question but there are no answers.

eyelidlessness 6y ago
> Any system that ranks things purely based on votes or view counts can have a feedback loop that can amplify "bad" results that happen to get near the top for whatever reason. I think this is a place where Google has pretty obvious algorithm problems. For example, I’m building a personal website for the first time in many years, and obviously that means I’m doing a fair bit of looking up new or forgotten webdev stuffs. It’s widely known that W3Schools is low quality/high clickbait/has a long history of gaming the SEO system. They’ve been penalized by Google’s algorithm rule changes but continue to get the top result (or even the top 3-5 results!), even with Google having a profile of my browsing habits, and knowing that I intentionally spend longer on these searches to pick a result from MDN or whatever. It seems pretty likely that W3Schools is just riding click rate to stay at the top. And it’s pathological.
- beckingz 6y ago
  Is w3schools that bad? for some languages, W3schools is as good a reference or better than the official documentation. And they're definitely better than most seospam.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    W3Schools is awful. The official documentation is hard to navigate, but W3Schools is notorious for misleading and poor quality examples and advice. MDN, caniuse, CSS Tricks and such are much better resources. Edit: I semi-intentionally forgot to mention Stack Overflow because it’s so unpredictable in terms of quality.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

> Any system that ranks things purely based on votes or view counts can have a feedback loop that can amplify "bad" results that happen to get near the top for whatever reason. I think this is a place where Google has pretty obvious algorithm problems. For example, I’m building a personal website for the first time in many years, and obviously that means I’m doing a fair bit of looking up new or forgotten webdev stuffs. It’s widely known that W3Schools is low quality/high clickbait/has a long history of gaming the SEO system. They’ve been penalized by Google’s algorithm rule changes but continue to get the top result (or even the top 3-5 results!), even with Google having a profile of my browsing habits, and knowing that I intentionally spend longer on these searches to pick a result from MDN or whatever. It seems pretty likely that W3Schools is just riding click rate to stay at the top. And it’s pathological.

beckingz 6y ago
Is w3schools that bad? for some languages, W3schools is as good a reference or better than the official documentation. And they're definitely better than most seospam.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  W3Schools is awful. The official documentation is hard to navigate, but W3Schools is notorious for misleading and poor quality examples and advice. MDN, caniuse, CSS Tricks and such are much better resources. Edit: I semi-intentionally forgot to mention Stack Overflow because it’s so unpredictable in terms of quality.