[docs] [issue15871] Online docs: make index search always available.

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy added the comment:

We have collectively spent much time creating reasonably good module and term indexes and more improvements can and will be made. I strongly feel that they should be made as easily searchable and usable as the full text searches that are generally less useful to useless and are always more resource consuming.

You already answered your first question. While 'print' is listed second (but should be first)-- after a delay that would not be needed if the index were used -- it is followed by 62 lines of noise. What a waste. If the index were used, the response to 'with' would start with 'with: statement'.

As for other searches: 'if' returns hits for 'snIFf', 'dIFference', 'hexlIFy', etc, but not the 'if' statement, which would be first if the index were used; **' return no hits, whereas an index search would return the current entries for '**'. Ditto for '%' and '&'. Google and other search engines do not search for symbols. It is a shame that the search box on the docs does not either. A few years ago I collected to data needed to vastly improve the symbol index, but doing so will not do the current doc search box any good if the index is not used.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue15871>
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