[cpncrunch]

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 :)

[streetnigga]

Please explain this theory of filtering results out some more.

[nilkn]

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.