Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is telling of how often the python docs actually solve peoples’ questions. For example, I searched “python string replace”, with the first 4 being tutorialpoint, w3schools, geeksforgeeks, stack overflow and at position 8 is the python docs.

The issue with the python docs for this search is that it takes me to “built-in types”, and starts off with things totally irrelevant to what I want. I now have to go searching for string, then find the built-in method replace. Meanwhile, the other tutorial-esque websites almost all show an example of str.replace above the fold. If you’re Google and you’re trying to get people information faster, you’re going to promote the result that has more people not coming back to the search result page afterwards because it was hard to find the answer on that result.

I think string replacement in Python is a particularly egregious example because strings are core language types. Library docs are a lot better organized and a lot more easily indexed. This is just a problem with Python's docs in general, imo.

You want Google to direct you to the correct anchor on the page. That makes sense, Google should do that. The docs shouldn't be broken out to 1 page per method because Google likes to link to the top of the page instead of the relevant anchor tag.

This is true, and if you want the docs you can always just add the word docs to your query. Expecting the search engine to always favor one thing seems like it'd work well in this case for some people, but in other cases might get mushy

I personally configure custom search engines for things like this so if I want docs specifically, I'll type something like "py collections" which directs me to https://docs.python.org/3.10/search.html?q=collections.

I find this especially useful since I often otherwise find myself typing site:python.org (or similar things, like if I just want to see the MDN page instead of going through w3schools or blog posts for examples).

edit: in the particular example for str.replace, I found it buried in the results for "py replace", at the top of "py str.replace" (helps if you know what Python calls the type) and basically nowhere for "py string replace".

Yup, python docs need to look at cppreference

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