Re: "GIN and GiST Index Types" page is about usage in full text search, but looks general purpose

On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 1:28 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Proposed patch attached. The existing text already says "GIN indexes are
> the preferred text search index type", so I'm not sure we need to go
> further than that about guiding people which one to use. In particular,
> since GIN can't support included columns, we can't really deprecate GiST
> altogether here.

LGTM.

> > There is always the extreme option of excluding older versions in
> > robots.txt. I bet that would work.
>
> Yeah, I was wondering about that too. It's sort of the nuclear option,
> but if we don't want to modify EOL'd versions then we may not have any
> other way to keep Google from glomming onto them.

I think that our recent decision to just live with the downsides that
go with making the most recent stable release docs canonical was a
wise one, on balance. The reality is that we have very few ways of
influencing search results from Google.

I don't know enough about the topic to be able to claim that the
robots.txt solution would also work out well, in about the same way.
But I suspect that it might, and know that it's a reversible process.

--
Peter Geoghegan