Re: Is my MySQL Gaining ?

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 16:45:40 -0500,
  Ericson Smith <eric@did-it.com> wrote:
>
> Today, we use search engines as the starting point on the web (except
> for bookmarked or otherwise memorized pages). Why build systems that
> breaks that paradigm, or take advantage of it insufficiently?

That may be how you do things, but I don't know that everyone does that.
I use search engines for some stuff. For postgres I run a doc command
that run lynx and points to a local documentation list with about a half
dozen documentation sets I use commonly. I follow the Postgres link
to get to the Postgres table of contents and then go to which ever section
has the information I want.

I think you are expecting a bit much out of general search engines if you
expect them to figure the correct part of the documentation to return.
If you have to go back and forth with the search engine, you are probably
better off using the table of contents.

Scrolling down large pages even when the search engine doesn't point you
to the nearest anchor to what you are looking for isn't that slow.
If the page is really big, you can do a text search within the page.

I think it is more important for the documentation to be easily readable than
for it to be designed so that searched for information will always be
near the top of the returned page.

P.S. Do you think anyone at Google has thought of adding anchors to their
returned URLs to get you closer to the terms you were searching for?