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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

To what site were you expecting to see a link? Isn't the better complaint here that there simply isn't any good public content on this subject and that all the official docs are behind paywalls or NDAs?

FWIW: I just tried "mazda 5 wiring diagram", and indeed there's nothing good there. But... I think that's because there's nothing good there. I suspect if I really want that document I'm going to have to buy it.

I mean, everyone in a technical field deals with this. There's stuff out there, but it's going to be on some rando adware site with questionable licenses. Datasheets for old ICs. Repair documentation for consumer electronic devices. Even regulatorily required stuff like MSDS sheets for older products tends to not be available in public places.

But the search engine can't fix that for you.

[1] With the notable exception of software development, where open source has freed us from those walls. But also instilled in us the attitude

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The info is there and has always been there: in traditional, non-SEO optimized forums. But they have been flushed off the search results pages by irrelevant SEO optimized GitHub copycats and mediocre fluff text recipes.

Do you have any actual hard data you can link to?

When I test your hypothesis by searching for "2019 honda cbr1000rr wiring diagram" [1] the first results are images of the wiring diagrams and then links to the exact non-SEO optimized forums you're talking about with a post that contains a PDF file available to download for the exact motorcycle I'm interested in.

[1]: https://snipboard.io/nkQY6U.jpg

Try the link below.

Its not the exact term I used over the weekend in my original post, but this is a basic enough one. Since it's more basic, it actually has a good result or two first. Then falls into spam upon spam. My original search over the weekend has only spam.

https://www.google.com/search?q=2002+chevy+s10+brake+wiring+...

I would normally just upvote, but I want to personally thank you for following up with a motivating example.

I eventually found results by adding forum to the search.

But even if there weren't any good results, which I know there are because someone somewhere has asked for a wiring diagram of the tail lights many times, and someone out there has access to a diagram (usually a mechanic).

But regardless of results or not, Google serving 20+ pure spam and malware results less technical users might fall for is insane IMO.

> I think that's because there's nothing good there

One problem is that Google can't bear to serve you up no results, because potential delicious advertising revenue.

Rather than say there aren't any results, they'll serve up fifteen ads (barely recognisable as such) that match something vaguely similar, ignore a few words in your search term that would have excluded some profitable results, rewrite your search term into something that it feels like you should be searching for, drop the quotes around your phrases to find more pages, or some other infuriating reinterpretation.

So even if there isn't anything good there, it's hard to get a feel for whether the data are sparse or you're just being funnelled to stuff that's more profitable.

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