I wouldn't expect the official documentation for anything to fare well with web search algorithms. This is probably a place where I'd support manual intervention, to boost docs/manuals/man pages/etc.

Honestly, this is because the organization of the Python 3 docs is terrible.

The documentation for str.replace is located halfway down an enormous page that describes every single built-in type in the language [1].

And then, once you manage to find the entry for str.replace, what does it tell you?

Return a copy of the string with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. If the optional argument count is given, only the first count occurrences are replaced.

That's it. No examples, no link to re.sub or other functions you might want to use for replacement. Stack Overflow or even W3Schools (gasp!) is much better results for this.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html

I for one have never cared for the Python Doc Site and layout. Too much info for a "quick" lookup. I only need 1 line of code to show me how to replace strings in p3

Maybe because more people who types those queries find the first result from GeeksforGeeks page more useful ? People searching for those are more likely beginner programmers. Being an old unix geek, I personally do like the official documentation better but it's true the official documentation is a lot more obtuse for beginners, whereas that first result looks a lot more friendly with examples, etc.

My experience is that DDG results are now on par with google's (minus the brute force effect that the country selector is on local results. Without it, no Irish sites can be found, with it, Irish blogspam will get rated above the site I want, so I need to keep toggling it).

This isn't really down to any huge improvement on DDG, but rather a decline in Google's results. I'd just been putting it down as a consequence of Google having less data on me as I made a conscious effort this year to diversify my usage of other sites.

If you're looking for alternatives, DuckDuckGo has made vast improvements over the last 6-12 months. Tried switching about a year ago and went back to Google due to low quality results.. Gave it another whirl this month and the difference is night and day. I've barely used Google since. Definitely give it a shot if you haven't recently, you may be pleasantly surprised!

Same here, I’m getting pretty bad results. The SERPs for me include either news results which I really am not interested in or spammy auto-generated stuff that has almost no relevance.

I don't know about OP, but I almost always go to a search engine looking for something specific, and I know when I've found it.

On the rare occasion that I search for some general concept like a current event, I'm quite happy that nutjobs like Daily Stormer get filtered out.

Even in those cases, I'm usually just trying to get straight to a relevant article on a publication that already know of. e.g. "wapo impeachment"