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Comment by vilius | Hacker News Reader

Oh and w3schools.com needs to go below MDN because it's less informative.

Even today I wanted to read about transform-origin and landed on w3schools [0], where MDN article [1] is clearly superior.

[0] https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_transform-origin.as...

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/transform-o...

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I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I actually like W3schools. Most of their infamous errors are gone and they are usually more “to the point” than Mozilla docs, which are a sometimes too prolific and not as clear.

It's "to the point" in the sense of being a more concise basic introduction. But MDN hits the right balance of being comprehensive yet accessible in a way nothing else does.

Plus W3Schools' very name is an SEO hack, so their Google rank is built upon fundamental dishonesty.

How is "w3schools" an SEO hack more than any other name?

Because it implies an association with the W3C

The biggest problem with that site is that it's sometimes good. Sometimes. I never know that before I click if the required info is there or not or it's good enough or still relevant. With MDN my expectations are high but they are always matched.

That's why I installed the W3Schools removal chrome extension :)

All my web platforms searches are now "mdn <web-thing>" cause w3schools is never informative enough for me.

I actually have a couple of bash scripts just for this when I want to look something up specifically at mdn, and thought about expanding it to stack overflow and reddit.

What's that? Why yes I have heard the phrase 'bikeshedding', why do you ask? ;)

DDG's `!` searches are your friend:

`!mdn whatever` will search MDN. Similarly !so, !reddit and a whole lot more.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I like W3schools too, you're correct it's better these days. The site has helped me a lot when I needed to quickly get help usually with CSS or HTML. I like the "try it yourself" feature, and the examples are usually good. Not sure how good it is for JS and Jquery, I usually use Jquery.com and stackoverflow for JS.

Does Google manually adjust weights? While I agree with you, I always supposed that Google weights websites according to their own algorithms, not because some moderator thinks that it's less informative. If w3schools is higher, probably there are technical reasons, for example more users prefer it (may be content is easier to understand).

They apply “manual actions” all the time.

Sure, so they need to improve the algorithms in this way so they produce the desired results. In other words, algorithmically driven manual actions.

> The Manual Actions report lists instances where a human reviewer has determined that pages on your site are not compliant with Google's webmaster quality guidelines. Google's algorithms can detect the vast majority of spam and demote it automatically; for the rest, we use human reviewers to manually review pages and flag them if they violate the guidelines. Flagged sites can be demoted or even removed entirely from Google search results.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824?hl=en

Specifically mentioned on that page is "Redirecting users away from the image on the site when the user clicks "view image" in Google search results" as an example of "image cloaking behavior".

I use the personal blocklist extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...) just to block w3schools.

Exactly the same here!

When searching for things like that, I usually prefix my search with MDN, or even better, just use ddg for technical searches. These days, ddg is getting pretty good at showing results of typical coding/technical questions. If my search is for a very fringe/specific/new topic, I fall back to google (which you can from ddg with the `!g` prefix)

Back when I was writing a lot of C++ professionally I felt the same way about cplusplus.com vs. the (IMO much superior) cppreference.com. I'd love to be able to teach my search engine simple rules like "if a Wikipedia article matches my search, show it first" or "never show results from linkedin".

As a noob I actually prefer w3school's page to start ... and then I'd read MDN.

Maybe the noob clicking behavior is influencing the ranking?

Perhaps, but at least they don't require you to signup just to view a stupid image.

The examples w3schools have are useful, and MDN has less of them. But maybe that's my subjective experience. Still, I've made lots of use from both of them, and looking past the first hit should not be that difficult, especially for us programmers.

Edit: funny that people downvote this.

Both are good and I use both. There's something about the layout of w3schools I find nicer and quicker to read. Sometimes I spend about 10 seconds on the site and I'm done. That's the mark of a good UI when you're in and out in 10 seconds with the info you need.

While we're in the same vein, Google should remove the dumbed-down content altogether for anyone flagged as a "developer" by their algos, and replace it with man pages and source docs. MDN is a step up, but I usually skip past it, because the actual specification papers are most always better (except for ATOM and OpenLayers!).

Generally I prefer specifications too, but ever since the WHATWG-W3C split, it's become a choice between stuff that isn't yet implemented (WHATWG), and stuff that never was implemented (W3C). At least MDN documents accurately what one major browser supports, and includes compatibility tables for others.

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