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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).

The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful. I'd rather it wasn't Discord, but it is the lowest friction way of putting people in touch right now - at least, those within a certain demographic.

There are many alternatives to Discord, self-hosted or otherwise, but nothing else comes close in terms of the audience you can reach.

I don't think docs should live in Discord, but I can see why they end up like that.

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Give me an example of a search for a given tools documentation that doesn’t have the result on the first page. Google seo is bad but I think this is hyperbole because I use it to find documentation easily most every day.

Search "python __init__" (sans quotes)

The the first page of results are from, in order:

    mygreatlearning.com
    udacity.com
    geeksforgeeks.org
    stackoverflow.com
    w3schools.com
    micropyramid.com
    edureka.co
    pythonmorsels.com
    tutorialspoint.com
    pythontutorial.net

Some of these resources are alright, but none of them are python.org or other primary source. As a python user and google expert, I know how to tweak my query to get better results, but if I was a novice I wouldn't.

On the other hand, if I went to the python community discord server, I'd probably get a sensible response from a real human in seconds. (the python discord is particularly excellent, by the way)

Surprising, the same search on duckduckgo gives me:

  www.w3schools.com  
  stackoverflow.com  
  docs.python.org

and a sidebar quoting the 2nd result which is the top voted answer to: "What is __init__.py for" on Stackoverflow.

Google is in a sad state it seems.

Google has a vested interest in you going to websites that serve their ads.

It doesn't seem like python.org answers the question very well? As in the implied question of "What is python __init__?"

The returned sites do?

If I google "php __construct" I get php documentation as the first result.

Google knows when someone doesn't find the answer they're looking for from a result, I suspect the results you're seeing are the ones the majority of searchers for that query wanted.

> The instantiation operation (“calling” a class object) creates an empty object. Many classes like to create objects with instances customized to a specific initial state. Therefore a class may define a special method named __init__(), like this:

  def __init__(self):
      self.data = []

> When a class defines an __init__() method, class instantiation automatically invokes __init__() for the newly created class instance. So in this example, a new, initialized instance can be obtained by:

  x = MyClass()

Seems like a good explanation to me? Maybe people are upset that it's buried a bit in the docs instead of having a tiny out of context statement about it?

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html

Yes, I suspect people saw a wall of text and went back to look for a shorter answer.

I would guess google A/B tested those results till python.org fell off the front page.

More to the point, I don't think either google or the people searching are wrong for that. The query isn't "teach me about python classes" it's "what is python __init__?".

Yea, I used to get annoyed when I saw results like this. But I appreciate them more and more. It's still easy to find what you're looking for with a quick Ctrl+F. But there inevitably comes a time when I want to understand a concept deeper, and I can come back to results like this for the longer explanation.

I know that it doesn't have to be either a long explanation or a quick and concise snippet of information, it can be both. But I find that a lot of docs will either have long explanations or short snippets (because time is finite and doing both is duplicating efforts), and in those cases, I prefer the long explanation.

Thats not what I mean by using a search engine to parse documentation. I would just type “python documentation” where the first link I get is the documentation. Then I would search within that documentation for “ __init__” which, when tested just now, took me about 30 seconds all in to get to the known good source of truth here. That’s pretty good I think.

But why would a novice care if it came from python.org, providing the information was accurate? I don't think you've found a good example of what the GP was asking for, at any rate. I've certainly had that experience recently, but it turns out it was something more obscure than I would have expected (relating to ensuring that gulp scripts don't return an error code when warnings occur - I'd searched for `gulp --warnoff` and none of the answers were anything to do with the gulp tool, but it turned out "--warnoff" wasn't a standard flag anyway, though there is a blog post about how to add support for such a flag).

geeksforgeeks.org is really dark pattern-y, and has been extremely high ranking for python related questions that seemed to come out of nowhere.

It's still good for finding documentation if you know the domain it's hosted on, which for product documentation you should. Just add "site:documentation.com" to your search query.

> The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful.

100%. But different strokes for different folks, as well as at different times in the evaluation/discovery journey. Many devs don't want to talk to someone.

From the perspective of the product company, things are a bit different. If you are pre-product market fit, you probably want every interaction with a possible customer/user you can, so you can move towards understanding the problem space. Set up discord for that.

Once you find PMF, it's all about setting yourself up for scaling. We made a choice to scale back chat and focus on online, public forums, and it worked out well for us. If you want to talk to a human, you can absolutely engage with our sales team, or in other public spaces like Twitter.

That said, some projects are big enough or inspire enough people that the community can scale on discord. Haven't seen that often, but it happens.

> Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).

Agree for generic programming queries, but for product specific queries, I haven't noticed that. And product specific queries are what documentation and forum are designed to help with.

>The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful

In a fresh and new project. But how will it look in 5 years when the user numbers are smaller because of other new projects?

This isn't a new problem. I was doing some classic iPod research a while back, looking back on mid-00s hardware research. Some knowledge was present only in IRC chat logs, and some is surely lost to the sands of time. Similar story with PDA hacking.

The knowledge still needs to be transferred to wikis etc. so that it can be preserved long-term.

There were many times when I would have been lost without the Internet Archive. And more than once it was because of discontinued platforms on MS.

Knowledge in forums or now Discord has a shorter half-life until it's gone completely.

That's sad.

Nobody is writing SEO blogspam for your support problems.

The problem is that users type in "how to do X" into Google. End users often enough don't even know the website of your application, I know so many people who literally go to Netflix by typing in "Netflix" in the bar and click the first link.

But Google has dumbed down so hard that scammers using generic keywords outcompete everyone including yourself (or outright clone/farm SO/Wikipedia/whatever), which is why many people add "stackoverflow" or "reddit" to the search terms, and the latter broke a few weeks ago when many subs went private.

The most annoying thing is, Google could shut down a lot of these scammers if they would invest in a couple hundred people to look at the most frequent questions and rate the top 20 sites - everyone caught to be a blatant spammer gets the boot, and everyone selling fake dick enlargement pills or whatever gets the police with the full support of the billions of dollars of Google. But they seem to have completely stopped all effort into their core product...

I suspect they've figured out that whole search engine business model thing has been deprecated for months in its current form. Their product has been shitty in specific areas for several years now.

Google being ran internally akin to the Soviet union has lead to a competitive advantage being not just lost, but far surpassed. As nature intended.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/epstein-knew-dirty-secret... – 2019

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/04/google-co-founder-larry-page... – May 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

> On December 3, 2019, Larry Page announced that he would step down from the position of Alphabet CEO and be replaced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

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