The search box on www.freebsd.org..

[Steve Franks]

On 5/10/07, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 10 May 2007 01:07:57 pm Simon L. Nielsen wrote:
> > On 2007.05.10 11:46:56 -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> > > SUCKS/BLOWS CHUNKS/etc.
> > >
> > > Really, it's bad.  I just typed in 'logo' to find the page about logo
> usage,
> > > and it returned 0 results, not even http://www.freebsd.org/logo.html.
> That's
> > > exceedingly lame.  Its worse than having no search box at all because
> people
> > > will try to _use_ it and then get frustrated.  It should either be killed,
> or
> > > it should be replaced with something that actually _works_ (probably it
> > > should make use of Y!, Google, or Rambler.ru something to do the search).
> >
> > I think most people agree with that, the problem is that it takes some
> > time to get right and there currently aren't that many active doc
> > committers since they over time seem to gravitate towards src...
> >
> > doc are unfortunatly not as good as src, and even more ports, at
> > getting new people.
>
> Then perhaps we should at least turn it off for now until we can fix it?
>
> --
> John Baldwin
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>

Just my unneeded opinion of assent - as a newbie, I frequently get my
questions answered on freebsd-questions, and the answer is often "read
this handbook page", which, of course, never came up in the search I
just did for topic X.  Unfortunately, takes a very smart human to make
a computer as smart at guessing what another human is asking as
another human.

I've yet to try an "advanced" google search, and confine it to the
freebsd handbook pages, but I suspect that might be a good option.

Another bias I have found personally to work in my advantage at most
times is to always prefer a "browse" option to a "search" option.
Probably I should try that with the handbook also, although I have to
rely on my understanding of the topic of each chapter...

Google being the rather open company they are, I'm sure we could add a
link to the (top, in my opinion) of the search results page, titled,
"not finding what you are looking for?  try: <link>", with several of
these ideas, namely,
"http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&hl=en&num=10&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freebsd.org%2Fdoc%2Fen_US.ISO8859-1%2Fbooks%2Fhandbook%2F&as_rights=&safe=images"

One could be added for the manpages online as well - amazing how many
newbies have crying babies, etc. in the background and never even
bother to click the "documentation" link if the search fails ;)

Steve