Hacker News Reader

Comment by bangaroo | Hacker News Reader

you would think a company full of engineers working on web technology building a tool for finding info on the internet would understand and adjust for the fact that literally nobody on earth has ever wanted to go to w3schools, ever, at all, in the history of the entire universe.

View on HN

Speak for yourself. The W3Schools site has a clean information architecture, short chapters on topics and working example code with a sandbox.

The MDN site on the other hand is a pure technical reference site, like PHP.net.

Considering that search works by way of matching search phrases to site text, it's not at all surprising that Stack Overflow and W3Schools rank higher than the reference manual sites.

No one who actually cares about the quality of the results is in charge. And for search results like the one given in the link (for "aws lightsail xray"), there are no ads, and thus the folks in charge of Google search these days probably prefer the results to be broken.

Like many companies that stop innovating, it's not the engineers who are in control. "Tonerheads" are. Raghaven has Search under his thumb. Ads is putting on pressure for revenue, and their incentives are not entirely aligned with Search.

I didn't know what "tonerheads" were. First Google search for the term gives a reddit link and enough of a summary to understand the meaning. Presumably people aren't trying to make money from that search...

Here's a YouTube video of a Jobs interview where the idea originated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo8zdPNMRdY

A while ago I started checking each highly ranked but low quality site in Google search for Google ads.

I'm never disappointed.

You can guess the answer for w3schools...

To be fair, a site like w3schools will worry much more about SEO than MDN, but I'm willing to bet that "shows our ads" has a positive impact on site ranking.

Low quality results that display their ads are the ideal scenario for Google:

1 user searches Google, sees some adds

2 user visits low quality site, sees more Google ads

3 user doesn't find useful information, goes back to search

4 repeat

Oh but of course! If the site shows Google ads then it must be a high-quality, trustworthy site, so you see they'd be irresponsible to not use it! (/s)

I think there are two unrelated causes to this:

1. Marginally cleaning up low-volume technical search results is not going to get anyone promoted or a stock refresher.

2. Most of the programmers at Google are probably good enough not to have to Google programming questions.

And agreed about w3schools, expert sexchange, etc.

> good enough not to have to Google programming questions.

This is the most hilarious concept I've ever heard.

...or they're good enough to know not to use Google for programming questions (and go directly to StackOverflow)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com