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>.
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.
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?