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Comment by westoque | Hacker News Reader

I just wish they had better SEO than say W3Schools

I'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.

Same. Maybe I'll make a point of not appending the "mdn" and just scrolling down until I find the MDN result, in the future.

In firefox you can also add it as an alternative search engine.

You 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".

If 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.

I 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.

Any reasonable web browser lets you assign keywords to searches. No need to go through a third-party.

Which mobile browsers allow this? Does it synchronise them?

I've used these a lot in the past, but switched to DDG's bangs largely because it was such a pain to change browsers/devices, and none of them ever worked for me on mobile. DDG's bangs are still a little unwieldy (! isn't a very convenient character to type, especially on mobile), so an alternative would be nice. For now though, the consistency everywhere far outweighs any other advantages of the in-built browser feature.

> Which mobile browsers allow this? Does it synchronise them?

Opera, yes.

I was a long time Opera user up until 12 and still use the mobile version. I can't seem to use keywords on mobile though. Are you sure it works? How do you set it up?

In Firefox custom keywords are just bookmarks, and those sync. So this works on mobile. All you have to do is create bookmark with "%s" in the URL where you need substitution and give it a keyword, and typing `<keyword> <searchterm>` in the URL bar will use the bookmark .

Unfortunately the UI isn't too great -- on desktop, the suggestions between the awesomebar show you that a keyword search will happen (just like when you type something matching an open tab it tells you that it will switch to tab unless you hit the down arrow to choose something else). On mobile there is no such indication, but hitting enter after typing the keyword followed by the query still works fine and does the keyword search thing.

I might try to fix that.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this, particularly as the "normal" search engines in Firefox don't sync. I think this is in the works but it's been held up by some kind of issues with their search partner deals.

Using DDG is an awesome, ethical thing to do. The fact that it's actually got perks over Google is just the cherry on top.

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

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 ... 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

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

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.

Same search on duckduckgo, first few results are (in order):

- 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 (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.

On DDG, you can use a bang search to directly get there too. Try: !rfc 1925

rfc-editor.org is an IETF-run service and is the official permanent home for RFCs now. See https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7990

Ouch! 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.

That 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=...

I 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)

Work started on that last year based on the RFC XML format. Or was it the year before that? It will get here eventually.

I think it's likely someone will go through old RFCs and convert them too.

I'd be quite happy with markdown.

FYI, 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

If 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-...

I installed "Personal Blocklist" extension exclusively for w3schools...

Me, 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. ;)

Am 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.

I find both to be very well done but MDN goes in depth the most.

The 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.

Historically maybe but I don't think that's true nowadays.

Even then, why would you support a closed, commercial, outdated website instead of MDN which is essentially a wiki?

The 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.

It already appears usually in higher positions than w3schools in Google, at least for me.

I 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.

i just add mdn at the end of my query.

Depending on the topic, I often get MDN above w3schools. And adding mdn is not much of a bother.

They show up pretty high on DuckDuckGo. I think W3Fools has more traffic and more hyperlinks from the DHTML years.

Google 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.

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