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Comment by 13of40 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's because Google somehow manages to index stack overflow better than the documentation. That, and stack overflow only answers real-world questions while the documentation tends to give equal weight to rarely and commonly used features.

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The reason is the text of the questions, which is what people type into the Google search bar. Documentation never has questions worded in the way people would commonly ask it.

For this reason, I wish they would allow redundant questions to be asked, if the phrasing is even slightly different. But the rule-mongering mods always remove it if they can.

Perhaps SO could include the titles of questions marked as duplicate somewhere in the markup so that Google indexes it?

Which is exactly what they do:

Should duplicates be deleted?

In general, no: most duplicates stay around. Having multiple copies of the same question with different wording is useful as search fodder, because people looking for an answer may use different wording too.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-du...

That's good to see that they actually have the right rules, but I've used it many times where my questions were closed simply for appearing similar to others (when I did not even find the others in my search results). I suppose the mods can be overzealous.

Being closed is not the same as being deleted.

I didn't think dupes on SO were removed, rather they are marked duplicate, linked to the original and closed, precisely because of discovery.

Exactly.

It's not due to some Google-fu though. People ask questions (on SO) in the terms they think about problems. But documentation is written according to the structure of the thing being documented.

So SO ends up being a more direct mapping from problem to solution. Google simply captures what's there (in both cases). It's certainly good to consult the authoritative docs in many cases.

Also, SO optimize for Google (it's a large part of their traffic and they are a successful business) while most documentation efforts don't have the resources or inclination to work hard on SEO.

That always annoys me. Instead of getting a link to the official documentation, I get 5 links to vaguely related StackOverflow questions, the most useful answer of which contains the link to the documentation.

the fact that you don't summon the official documentation by google search is exactly why the indexed questions are beneficial to you: being a glorified pattern matcher, google would spit out the docs only if provided by the documenatation precise wording itself, which if you knew, you wouldn't needed to find

besides, google is a knowledge base index, if you want to search a documentarion website you can both both inform google via site: or use the docs own search system which most have as of today

Google's got a lot of smart developers who you'd think would have figured out how to surface original documentation if they really wanted to.

why tho? it's easy enough to add +javadoc (or equivalent) to a class name, no need to second guess the user input

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