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Comment by prilo | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder how much this can be attributed to the pretty awful SEO of most documentation. I write mostly Python at work and it's infuriating how often GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools, Programiz, or RealPython pop up when I'm just trying to reference like, the arg order of a builtin, or the particular behavior. Django is worse, I often feel like I can't even find the doc when I know it's there and read it before.

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Documentation is largely static content. It isn't their job to play SEO games to convince search engines to surface it in the query results. Documentation is not a revenue generator for Google so it gets buried below the sites with Doubleclick ads.

For native documentation, why not just search the official docs at https://docs.python.org/ ?

I find it to be very discoverable if you are looking for docs about a specific function or module.

This is why I switched to Kagi.com it gives me results that are much more sane for things I'm looking for when it comes to a programming stance

Attempting to find the relevant docs page via search engines is generally not a good way to go, you should go to the documentation and search from there. Bookmark the landing page of the documentation.

People have already given many ideas, but if you use DuckDuckGo they have bangs for searching various python docs. Here's a page that lets you search which ones are available: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

Also, many pieces of software whose "documentation" is just some examples of its use.

Yeah, the official docs for python rarely if ever show up on the first two pages of search unless I do `from: python.org`.

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