It's hard to find documentation

[Fernando Pérez]

Bruce Eckel wrote:

> Sure, but why can't I use the search mechanism to do this? If it
> won't discover a document when I give it the exact title, it seems
> pretty difficult to find lesser things. For that matter, I can't
> think of when the search mechanism on the site has given me what I
> was looking for. It seems to vary between thousands of documents
> and "nothing found"
> 

Fully agreed. I consider the search engine at the site useless for 
all practical intents and purposes. My normal routine is to keep a 
bookmark to my local copies of:
- the main index for the html docs

- the general library index:
http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/genindex.html

and I always run pydoc -g as a webserver, and keep an open window at
http://localhost:7464/

This gives me full access to the docs. That, plus having 'from pydoc 
import help' in my shell defaults.

Don't bother with the website. You type

'Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter'

the *exact* title of the document 

http://www.python.org/doc/current/ext/ext.html

and you get *three* lousy hits, mainly on the words 'python' and 
'the'. The most recent is from 1996, and *none* refer to the above 
doc. So if the search engine can't even find major documents within 
the site itself, don't waste your time with it.

I have no idea why they don't use google instead. Type the same 
string in google, and even though it's searching *the whole web*, not 
just python.org, the very first hit is exactly the url above. The 
problem is simply that the 'ultraseek' engine that python.org uses is 
a complete piece of junk.

Google can be used by sites, so maybe at some point they'll change. 
In the meantime, use the web-wide google and prepend all your queries 
with 'python', or if you really want site-specific info only with 
'site:python.org'.

Cheers,

f