Re: Search points to ancient manuals

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 11:35 AM, Marti Raudsepp <marti(at)juffo(dot)org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au>
> wrote:
> >> I've often wished that the docs would redirect to the
> /current/interactive version when the referer is google. Not enough to
> write the code yet, though.
> >
> > That solution is backwards. You click on the Google link that says
> > "Documentation: 8.1: EXPLAIN", but when you click on it, you magically
> > end up in PostgreSQL 9.2 docs.
>
> You can actually get the search string from the referrer header and
> see if 8.1 is in it I suppose. But that's still not very good. The
> user might have seen multiple versions in their search results and
> chosen a specific version they wanted. Being redirected to a page
> different from what the search engine saw and showed the snippet is a
> bad idea.
>

Yes.

> Instead we should encourage or force Googlebot (and other search
> > engines) to index/prefer the current version of docs. I hear the
> > sitemaps file already gives higher priority to current, but clearly
> > that's not having the effect it should. I suspect most of our
>
> The documentation on sitemap.org isn't very clear on what this priority
> does:
>
> >> The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid
> values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not
> >> affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets
> the search engines know which pages
> >> you deem most important for the crawlers.
> >>
> >> The default priority of a page is 0.5.
> >>
> >> Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to
> influence the position of your URLs in a search
> >> engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when
> selecting between URLs on the same site,
> >> so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most
> important pages are present in a search index.
> >>
> >> Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on
> your site is not likely to help you. Since the
> >> priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your
> site.
>
> There are multiple suggestions here about what the priority might
> mean. Of course it's up to the individual search engines how they use
> this information.
>

Yeah, that's exactly the problem. It was originally supposed to work for
prioritising between pages on the same site, but it seems at least google
trusts their own algorithms a lot more (which may not be a bad thing in
general, but it's a bad thing for us at this point)

Keep in mind that Google might have an opinion about which results are
> most relevant to the user. When 9.2 is released it might be the case
> that most uses are actually still looking for 9.1. It may even be the
> case that most users today are currently looking for 8.4 or 9.0 due to
> some popular distribution shipping it.
>

That's probably true, and it's definitely something that changes over
time...

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/