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Comment by EduardoBautista | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how Stack Overflow is so popular for these types of questions. Usually the documentation is a much better source. So yes, using Stack Overflow instead of the documentation is a red flag for me.

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I think it's because Google somehow manages to index stack overflow better than the documentation. That, and stack overflow only answers real-world questions while the documentation tends to give equal weight to rarely and commonly used features.

The reason is the text of the questions, which is what people type into the Google search bar. Documentation never has questions worded in the way people would commonly ask it.

For this reason, I wish they would allow redundant questions to be asked, if the phrasing is even slightly different. But the rule-mongering mods always remove it if they can.

Perhaps SO could include the titles of questions marked as duplicate somewhere in the markup so that Google indexes it?

Which is exactly what they do:

Should duplicates be deleted?

In general, no: most duplicates stay around. Having multiple copies of the same question with different wording is useful as search fodder, because people looking for an answer may use different wording too.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10841/how-should-du...

That's good to see that they actually have the right rules, but I've used it many times where my questions were closed simply for appearing similar to others (when I did not even find the others in my search results). I suppose the mods can be overzealous.

Being closed is not the same as being deleted.

I didn't think dupes on SO were removed, rather they are marked duplicate, linked to the original and closed, precisely because of discovery.

Exactly.

It's not due to some Google-fu though. People ask questions (on SO) in the terms they think about problems. But documentation is written according to the structure of the thing being documented.

So SO ends up being a more direct mapping from problem to solution. Google simply captures what's there (in both cases). It's certainly good to consult the authoritative docs in many cases.

Also, SO optimize for Google (it's a large part of their traffic and they are a successful business) while most documentation efforts don't have the resources or inclination to work hard on SEO.

That always annoys me. Instead of getting a link to the official documentation, I get 5 links to vaguely related StackOverflow questions, the most useful answer of which contains the link to the documentation.

the fact that you don't summon the official documentation by google search is exactly why the indexed questions are beneficial to you: being a glorified pattern matcher, google would spit out the docs only if provided by the documenatation precise wording itself, which if you knew, you wouldn't needed to find

besides, google is a knowledge base index, if you want to search a documentarion website you can both both inform google via site: or use the docs own search system which most have as of today

Google's got a lot of smart developers who you'd think would have figured out how to surface original documentation if they really wanted to.

why tho? it's easy enough to add +javadoc (or equivalent) to a class name, no need to second guess the user input

It depends, documentation is organised very differently than SO. If you want to read up on how X works in general, then documentation style is useful; but if you want to find out a single narrow application of X, then stackoverflow style is useful.

For simplified example, if you want to find out what flag -wtf does in some unix utility, the man page would be useful; but if you'd want to find out which flags should be used to achieve WTF then you'd often need to read the whole documentation to find out - stackoverflow serves as a "reverse index" in this case.

The documentation is great when you know what you're looking for.

When you don't exactly, SO is a good pointer to the part of the documentation you didn't know.

yes back in the day IBM and DEC had good documentation today not so much

Not knowing why SO is so popular is a red flag for me.

Good SO answers usually link to the documentation. Often quicker to get to it via SO than to trawl through the docs hoping to find it.

It's not on SO people search for their problem; it's Google. If SO comes up before the official documentation, then I guess by at least a quantifiable metric, SO is not that much worse than the docs, after all...

If the doc was so good there wouldn't be a stackoverflow to begin with. The documentation is a better source, granted, but most of the man pages I read over the years seem to have been written by people who don't know how to communicate and explain concepts. It's like giving someone a mendeleev's table and expect them to be able to set up a chem lab and conduct experiments.

Well for me, I use stack overflow to translate. I want to do this in this language / framework, how do I do it?

I'm sitting at a bar in Turkey. I want to know how to say, "I want a beer," in Turkish. I know how to order a beer, drink the beer, and pay for the beer; I just want to know how to do it in my current circumstance.

I think it'd be great if there was a google JS snippet documentation sites could include to have a list of dynamic gotchas or faqs.

How many times have you read docs and thought "well that's relatively straightforward" just to end up googling an error message 10 minutes later and end up on SO.

I think a real solid skill is being able to ask google the right question when troubleshooting something.

NOT using SO it's are flash. Use all your tools. But SO answers are generally easier to understand than the documentation, or the docs don't actually explain the issue you are looking for, or they are out of date.

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