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.