The exact reason why you need some control over your search engine results.
For me, I have blackholed w3schools and boosted MDN in my search engine of choice. It is quite nice to always get the MDN page on a web-dev related query as the top result.
Even searching for "w3schools" directly results in the wikipedia as the top result (which is.. fair enough).
The same search on DDG results is a page full of w3schools & subdomains.
I was telling a junior to avoid w3schools and use MDN, but I couldn't really give him a reason besides "everyone seems to hate it". What's the rationale for all the shade thrown at w3schools?
w3schools is a for-profit company that survives on its schooling business. Its incentives are mis-aligned with mine: When I search for information on something web-dev related, I want it to be short & to the point. For w3schools, to maximize paid lesson uptake, it needs to only superficially explain what I want to know, enough to leave me confused and willing to pay for lessons.
That is even assuming w3schools has accurate information, which historically they did not, and there is no reason why they will not lapse in this regard in the future.
MDN has better aligned incentives on other hand, if I can find the information I need quickly, then I can developer faster and higher quality websites, which in turn in the aggregate will benefit the participants in MDN who are incentivized to increase their respective browser penetration (etc., I don't want to get into a whole discussion here).
At some point you come to a level where approximately 0% of the w3schools pages contain the information you need, but 100% of the MDN pages. So.. why have the overhead of w3schools results? Also, why develop bad habits early on?
I'd say w3schools is actually much better for beginners than MDN. If you learn HTML, CSS or JavaScript, MDN will often include too much unimportant information. (Similar to how Wikipedia math articles are often inscrutable for beginners because they are littered with lots of advanced low-importance information.) Additionally, w3schools has more easy "try it" examples which MDN consideres too trivial to bother with.
I agree though that MDN is much better than w3schools for non-beginners.
> When W3Fools was launched in 2011, the state of documentation for developers was poor. This site documented many content errors and issues with the W3Schools website. The Mozilla Developer Network was around but it did not have much support at the time.
> Today, W3Schools has largely resolved these issues and addressed the majority of the undersigned developers' concerns. For many beginners, W3Schools has structured tutorials and playgrounds that offer a decent learning experience. Do keep in mind: a more complete education will certainly include MDN and other reputable resources.
Using !mdn takes you to a mediocre-at-best MDN search page, not a specific page. My experience is that you’ll get better results from just adding the “mdn” keyword to the query and jumping to the first result—that is, instead of, say, `mix-blend-mode !mdn` (which takes you to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=mix-blend-mode), `mix-blend-mode mdn !` (which takes you to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/mix-blend-m... the ! to skip the results page and go to the first match can be at the start or end of the entire query). This technique doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up on MDN, but for realistic queries you’re almost certain to.
I want both of these to return sensible results for the bang-less search. This is the easiest for me and as a user of the search engine product, should also be what the search engine delivers me.
1. MDN's quality is higher, and it's more comprehensive when it comes to new browser specifications, but it's much less comprehensive in general technology/programming topics (e.g. W3Schools covers PHP which many working with e.g. Wordpress will dabble in alongside their HTML/CSS/JS).
2. Tenure. MDN's is much much more recent - W3Schools has been around forever.
W3Schools is a somewhat dodgy website with questionable quality, but it's hard to argue they've had a net-negative impact on educating programmers. I certainly learned a large chunk of my knowledge from W3Schools in the days before MDN docs existed in their current form.
