Comment by wolfgang42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolfgang42 | Hacker News Reader

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“python library datetime” gets the results you’re looking for—but mostly by virtue of this not being a way anyone ordinarily thinks of describing it, so it knocks the irrelevant results down in the rankings. I think there are a couple of things going on here:

- The ranking algorithm I’m using isn’t great at distinguishing pages about a topic from pages which merely mention a topic in passing.

- Because the Python docs are versioned, the PageRank they deserve is spread out over several URLs and they appear less relevant than they really are.

I have plans to fix both of these problems, but they’re pretty involved and I haven’t had the time to dig into the matter yet. For the moment, it’s definitely a gamble whether the results will be any good: sometimes they’re great, and other times they’re completely useless. (There’s a reason I put links to other search engines at the bottom of the results page!)

For a programming search engine, the official docs of languages should get special treatment. Google often surfaces outdated versions of the documentation, but they're usually at the top. If you want to improve on this, you should (a) rank official docs the highest, (b) give extra weight to docs.python.org if the query contains "python", (c) merge the same page for different versions and add a version picker.

I have long wanted a programming search engine where I could pick something like "Python" and "version 3.9" and always get the right thing. Similarly there is documentation for software packages that are similarly versioned (e.g. "react-router 4" vs "react-router 5")

If I know I want something from docs rather than SO, I open devdocs.io instead of a search engine. It's not a perfect solution but maybe it helps you as well.

All 3 of these are on my list (plus understanding page sections, which would improve the results for things like the Python docs where there’s a bunch of topics on a single page); I just haven’t gotten round to writing the code yet.

That exciting. I see your project as a financial index; but for search.

I would use it with the addition mentioned above. Add a newsletter subscription box maybe ?

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