All this talk about having the best, most authoritative, most professional, most correct and accurate information on your web site – throw it out the window. Okay, maybe I am being a bit sarcastic but stick with me here.

+Ryan Moulton a software engineer at Google since July 2006, who I believe works in search, was defending Google in a Hacker News thread and said:

To bring this into the context. He was defending why Google ranks w3schools results so highly, despite the content not being all that accurate. He said, while MDN might be much more accurate, it is often way too over the top for most newbies to understand and thus not as useful.

Ryan adds, “there’s a balance between popularity and quality that we try to be very careful with. Ranking isn’t entirely one or the other. It doesn’t help to give people a better page if they aren’t going to click on it anyways.”

He then gives an example:

He ends:

But is that what Google has been feeding us with Panda? Shouldn’t we strive to be perfect and detailed, not just partially accurate and useful?

Forum discussion at Hacker News.

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