This is the exact reply you offered me a few weeks ago when we were complaining about w3schools ranking at the top of Google's results. Ultimately, your "debugging" amounted to explaining that you rank lower-quality results higher because they are more "popular", and therefore, somehow, more useful.

I still don't understand the strategy of promoting less reliable, poorer quality information as a way to help the user. But it's easy to understand as a (short term) way to help Google, as these low-quality sites invariably carry Adsense, and the better sites often do not.

You didn't really give me a query to debug. I also don't think that's an accurate characterization. (Here's a link to the discussion for those curious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426892) People like w3schools probably because it has code samples front and center on every page. People find that very useful, even though as a reference MDN might be better in an abstract sense.

I am very honestly interested in these issues, and in the past HN has been a great source of queries that fail in interesting ways, which is why I keep posting this request.

On "html title tag" what do you want to know about it that the w3schools result at 1 doesn't give you? I know you may not like the site in general, but is there more to a title tag than that?

It includes no link to normative documentation, for one, but this isn't one of the most egregious examples of w3schools sitting at the top of search results when it provides absolutely terrible (either wrong, or completely useless) information.

A better example is: "html iframe element". Go ahead and look. What's more interesting here is that if you modify this query to "html iframe element scripting" the top 3 results are now w3schools, one related to the <script> tag, while the relevant section header in MDN on scripting isn't even highlighted in the matching result from MDN. The word "scripting" does not even appear in the rendered DOM of the w3schools page for <iframe>.

At this point, it's pretty safe to say that there's a reason, distinct from content quality, why w3schools is always promoted over better sources of information. Popularity doesn't seem likely either (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mozilla.org vs http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/w3schools.com). The site is:

1. Covered in questionable and low quality ads.

2. Intentionally misleading in general but especially in name (w3schools is not affiliated with the W3C or any standards body).

3. Abusing its position (in both search rank and in its misleading name) to sell useless "certifications" that not one company in existence would take seriously.

Why doesn't Google consider this a scam and factor that into its search ranking?

Thanks for following up with this. There's a real bug here that I'm passing along. Unfortunately, I can't share any of the details, so this will be a bit unsatisfying, but your hunch was correct, there is something wrong going on there.

That doesn't look like an example bad query to me.