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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

Google's interface seems to have improved recently, now that they have removed the duplicate left-hand column and put the options on top.

As for search results: I tried DDG again last week, and was shocked by the poor quality of results compared to google, bing or yandex. Search for "html table tag" and you'll see no w3schools or MDN results. Instead a lot of other, crappier sites. Google, yandex and bing all show w3schools and MDN near the top, so DDG must be filtering these results (which is ironic, given that they say they don't put you in a "filter bubble").

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I wouldn't consider w3schools a good search result, ever:

http://www.w3fools.com/

Why do you say that? (and please don't say you read it on w3fools)

In my own experience, w3schools is the quickest way of getting the information I want, which I guess is why it is at the top of google. I know it isn't cool to like w3schools, but then I'm not a cool programmer.

Sometimes I just need to confirm a particular attribute. I don't think W3S is very good, but I have been on the site enough times that I know I'll be in and out with what I need in about 10 seconds.

Lots of people complain about W3Schools. Some of those people say the Mozilla pages are a bit clunky.

Seems like a nice passive income project - man pages for HTML / CSS aimed at beginners but with advanced information too.

I'm surprised it hasn't already been done. Perhaps it has and I just don't know the URL.

http://html5index.org/

You can't fight the SEO feedback cycle. W3 schools was linked to by some people, so it shows up on Google, so it gets linked to by more people...

Some people? By internet standards, w3schools is ancient, and has been linked by many people over the years. Here[1], I present you their main page from close to 14 years ago. The copyright notice says 1999-2000, and I think I first visited it in 1999, but I could be mistaken. That's a long time for links to accrue.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20000815210025/http://www.w3schoo...

oh god, they used comic sans? No wonder every homepage in the early 2000s overused that font..

Also, look at the exact match keyword text links and their site structure. They were SEO'd before there was such a thing

MDN search has an api,

http://paulrouget.com/e/mdnapi/

There is now the Mozilla Developer Network which provides much better information. It does not top google results, though.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ta...

That is MDN, which is what I was talking about. MDN is one of the sites that is filtered out by duckduckgo for some strange reason.

My experience with exactly these and related terms has been almost opposite. Lately I needed to look up info on HTML and CSS a lot and not only am I constantly getting MDN results at the top, I usually get a snippet from the MDN page in the "instant answer" (or whatever it's called) box. Before searching for this stuff on DDG I never even realized how good of a resource MDN is (not that I actually needed much info on web related specs in the past).

Try logging out of your DDG account (if you have one), and searching for "html table tag" (without quotes) and you'll see what I mean. MDN is nowhere to be found. If you see it, then DDG must be showing us different results for some reason.

I find MDN and w3schools about equal, although I do find w3schools is a bit better laid out and quicker to get the info I'm looking for. MDN certainly isn't perfect...I just had a quick look for some html5 stuff (MediaElementAudioSourceNode) and the page is missing on MDN. I find that w3.org is the only place that has full specs for all the html5 stuff, but it's pretty difficult to navigate.

I don't have an account. You're right, for this particular query there's no MDN in results. I just tried "css box-sizing" (the first thing that popped into my mind) and MDN is the 3rd result. The quick answer thingy shows SO questions. So it can definitely be a hit or miss thing.

I agree with what you write about w3.org, it's almost painful to navigate when you just need a quick reference.

I'm surprised no one mentioned you can do !mdn "html table tag" and go straight to the mdn page.

The results seem perfectly usable to me, sorry your favorite sites are not top ranking[0]. Care to explain why you think DDG is explicitly filtering them?

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+%22html+table+tag%22

It's not that they're not top ranking - they don't appear anywhere in the first few hundred results. DDG must be filtering them because those sites are at the top of yandex and DDG says it is getting the results from yandex.

As for "perfectly usable", mountaindragon (result 2) and codesinhtml.com (result 3) are atrocious. And makemyownwebpage.com (result 10 or so) looks like a homepage from the 90s.

I think the issue is that DDG is getting crappy results from yandex, then filtering out the good sites to make the results even worse. Weird :)

Please explain this theory of filtering results out some more.

I don't know at all if this is true, but his argument seems to just be that DDG is pulling its results from yandex, yandex shows w3schools at the top, and DDG doesn't have it in the first few hundred results--therefore DDG is filtering or significantly reordering the yandex results.

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