We can do better than DuckDuckGo

Re:We can do better than DuckDuckGo by eyelidlessness on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @05:14PM (#25130645)

> Any system that ranks things purely based on votes or view counts can have a feedback loop that can amplify "bad" results that happen to get near the top for whatever reason.

I think this is a place where Google has pretty obvious algorithm problems. For example, I’m building a personal website for the first time in many years, and obviously that means I’m doing a fair bit of looking up new or forgotten webdev stuffs. It’s widely known that W3Schools is low quality/high clickbait/has a long history of gaming the SEO system. They’ve been penalized by Google’s algorithm rule changes but continue to get the top result (or even the top 3-5 results!), even with Google having a profile of my browsing habits, and knowing that I intentionally spend longer on these searches to pick a result from MDN or whatever. It seems pretty likely that W3Schools is just riding click rate to stay at the top. And it’s pathological.

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Re:We can do better than DuckDuckGo by beckingz on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @05:28PM (#25130778)

Is w3schools that bad?

for some languages, W3schools is as good a reference or better than the official documentation.

And they're definitely better than most seospam.

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Re:We can do better than DuckDuckGo by eyelidlessness on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @05:42PM (#25130916)

W3Schools is awful. The official documentation is hard to navigate, but W3Schools is notorious for misleading and poor quality examples and advice. MDN, caniuse, CSS Tricks and such are much better resources.

Edit: I semi-intentionally forgot to mention Stack Overflow because it’s so unpredictable in terms of quality.

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