The bottom line being that there is nothing you can do about it unless Python themselves fundamentally change how the documentation is structured, which I doubt they have plans to do.
I'm honestly surprised Google employees haven't fixed this somehow, surely they have thousands of people running into this problem daily.
Why?
Google is an ad company, that has integrated search.
Why would they cut their own bottom line in order to make data happy?
You aren’t their customer. You are Google’s data. Google’s customers buy your data.
Why would they change anything about their business model, which works amazingly well?
AFAIK, Google doesn’t sell user data.
They can coast for an indeterminate amount of time, but with the risk that eventually the consumer will be fed up and stop using them, especially if a decent alternative pops up.
Google’s business model is selling user data to the highest bidder. Google’s other business model is selling opportunity to collect data on people.
You as a search user are not a customer, but a data point.
There is literally no incentive for this to change.
Desiring an ad company to not show ads is a ridiculous desire.
At the same time google coordinates with their other customer and swaps the time and eyeballs for money.
But users are definitely a customer paying with time in return for search results.
If the product becomes too obnoxious, people don’t even need an alternative to quit. It’s happened with other products. Not everyone will quit, but the customer base will shrink.
Google’s data gathering isn’t just search.
Anyone not using Firefox, and even those who are using Firefox, is gifting Google data.
That data is worth more than search results or search data.
Google knows where you browse. Google knows how many clicks, scrolls, and keys pressed. Google knows what your email contents and preferences.
Search is a tiny portion of Google’s data collection behemoth and whether users quit Google search for bingo search doesn’t matter much to them.
Like I said, Python or any other language can fix this issue by changing the entire mindset of how documentation is built. You can then get the OSS community involved on GitHub to slam dunk on all the SEO spammers.
Just look at MDN or Web.dev, both have their content repos up on GitHub and people contribute metric tons of useful info. And both of these sites have healthy standings in the context of SEO.
Can’t remember the last time I visited W3S/GFG to be honest.
It’s about to get worse though as it appears that DigitalOcean is putting a nail in the coffin for CSS-Tricks and Google will absolutely demote it because of inactivity, only the most linked-to pages will survive until DO decides to shit the bed and try and move the entire site to their Tutorials platform.
Please, please, I beg of you, in the name of all that is holy, do not push for SEO bloat in documentation!
Certainly some of the Python queries could return a card promoting a result from python.org just like other queries return a card promoting wikipedia.org
Google search rank has been an ML driven algorithm for ages now and take into account dozens of signals. User rejection (how fast people come back to the search from a result click) and obviously which results get clicked more often are examples of that.
Based on other comments saying they like the sites I consider spammy, maybe the weights aren't even wrong, they're just not optimized for me!
Who, exactly? A professional Python programmer probably has their IDE/editor set up so it can shows a brief document for `str.endswith` already. Someone who is new to Python (probably not even a programmer yet) might actually prefer the hand-holding from those content farm pages.
Someone who has been exposed to the most basic Python features and knows they want info on str.endswith can just type help(str.endswith) in the Python interactive environment.
None of that is going to be given either in an IDE or from help().
Also, who'd actually want hand-holding from low quality content?
That is what Google is doing! But remember, the advertiser is the user, not the person running the search.
If you want to be the user, and get good search, pay for kagi.
- a stackoverflow answer that has a useful example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18351977/
- the Python documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html
- Pandas documentation (they also have an endswith): https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.Series.s...
- a blog post on Python regular expressions (this looks useful but is a wrong result for this query): https://www.johndcook.com/blog/python_regex/
- something that could be a content farm with rephrased Python documentation: https://pythontic.com/concepts/string/introduction
The top three results are good, and I guess it's a matter of taste whether the succinct Stackoverflow answer is better than the verbose official documentation.
Google's ENTIRE JOB is to surface the CORRECT content for a query. If they are objectively not doing that, then they are in the wrong. Imagine credit card fraud just kept increasing, and instead of adapting and improving their systems, companies just threw up their hands and said "deal with it, not our problem, nothing we can do" as you had to generate a new credit card number every other day because even the most trivial card number enumeration attacks were not stopped.
The fact that google is completely unwilling to change how they operate to prevent even the simplest, intern driven SEO trash from overtaking literally authoritative sources should be exhibit A in a trial to break up Google, as evidence of how negative value they are to the consumer.
It's the rough equivalent of Fedex just throwing away a third of the packages they are supposed to deliver at random, and people seemingly just saying "eh, nothing can be done"
Google's job is to serve ads profitably. It's something like 90% of their profit (80% of revenue). To some extent they even have an incentive to show poorer results first because it makes you stay on the page longer and look at more sites (more ad impressions).
I think that could mostly be done in an automated fashion to start. Then into the master doc you can start adding hinting and extra material that gets rendered into the sub-pages. So it could be approached gradually.
Nor should they, in my opinion. Quality of documentation is more important than that.
We've come full circle.