Documentation Search Hard to Use
Hi, I have an improvement suggestion, which you may or may not agree with. I personally find the search function on the docs.python.org site to pretty difficult to use effectively. If you do a search, it appears that you get results first from method/class/package/etc names, ordered lexicographically, then you get a section of fulltext search results, also ordered lexicographically, then finally a section of fulltext results from various HowTo's and FAQs. There is no indication of the change between these sections, this is just from observation. My issue is that I have no way of picking out which results are the most relevant. If I use a search term like xml for instance, I first get every keyword result from the names of things like classes/packages/methods, which is a lot of things. Even down in the fulltext results, I have no indication of relevance, everything is ordered by lexicography, which means that items in Chapter 1 come first, then Chapter 10-19, then Chapter 2, then Chapter 20-29, ... , and on and on. Same with the FAQ/HowTo results. I'm wondering if there is a reason for using results such as these and not a more typical relevance based search? In fact you could still list the names of things at the top, put a divider, and do relevance on the fulltext entries, if you still want the name based things. I have a Xapian powered search on a site I manage that does it quite capably and with lightning speed. As it stands now, I use the index to find things if I know what they are called, and otherwise have to open a new tab and use Google. However, if I'm looking for docs just on Python 3.x for instance, the query "xml site:docs.python.org/py3k" yields only one result (I wonder, is robots.txt set up to not index it?). So that means I'm more likely to do "xml site:docs.python.org" and then click the link and change the path to say "py3k" after the domain. I know you guys probably have a lot to do - is there any way I can assist in this area? Thanks, Jason
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Jason Kotenko