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Comment by brlewis | Hacker News Reader

I bet googlers on HN who work on ranking would appreciate that. Here's a recent one from me:

  typical tcp packet size

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What exactly do you mean by that? When I search it up I get a SO answer saying what the max packet size is and another (closed) SuperUser answer that says that their is no average tcp packet size because that depends on the specific application. Both of those seem pretty good to me, but I'm not a low level networking guy.

I think the problem is that google confidently and authoritatively displays (in a big and bold font) "65535 bytes" which is an answer to a different question.

I definitely wasn't asking for maximum packet size, which a search feature showed in huge print as the answer to my question. I don't expect the search algorithm to know my precise intent, but I'd like it to weigh the word "typical" highly.

Between google, bing and duckduckgo, only duckduckgo presented this above the fold: https://etherealmind.com/average-ip-packet-size/

I'm seeing that etherealmind link as #4 on Google, and then #3 on DDG. And the results above it on DDG are also related to the maximum size, and the entire sidebar on DDG is the same stackoverflow link about the maximum size.

Not sure if DDG is really that much better than Google here.

In Google, after that card, I get their "People also ask", and the second question is "What is the average packet size?", which links to https://superuser.com/questions/964682/what-is-the-average-s...

Seems ok to me.

It should also be noted that the etherealmind.com link doesn't actually contain the word "typical", so if you think Google should try to outsmart users less, it's not reasonable to blame it for not showing that link.

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