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The documentation pages are all that matter, and quite frankly, they are great.
by jrobn 8y ago
The documentation pages are all that matter, and quite frankly, they are great.
- ximeng 8y agoExcept that every Google search returns a result from a different random version number.
- dspillett 8y agoThey can't really control that as a number of external factors part into Google's rankings (i.e. links from elsewhere), other than to make navigation to the right version easy which they seem to have managed (in, my, admittedly limited, experience there is always a version selection in the page head and the links go where you'd expect).
- ximeng 8y agoThe above comment is one of my most upvoted ever. It's annoying to have to click twice to get to the latest version. Maybe they make it too easy to get to old versions - I don't think I've ever seen a link to Wikipedia that points to an old version of a page. Not saying this is an easy problem to solve, and the documentation is mostly pretty great, but this definitely bugs me and apparently a bunch of other people too.
- marcosdumay 8y agoOld Wikipedia pages are just dated and not useful as a starting point. Documentation for old versions of Postgres are the most up to date page for anybody using that version. I am one of the people that gave you an upvote, but this is not a fair comparison at all.
- ximeng 8y agoNot aiming to be unfair to postgres - it's not an easy problem and the documentation is great, and it is different to Wikipedia where old content is generally objectively worse. I guess for postgres 80% of people would be happy with always landing on the current version, and making an extra click or adding a version to their search if they really need documentation for older versions. Maybe adding a brief version history at the bottom of documentation pages would reduce the need for old versions even further.
- kingbirdy 8y agoI think a solution might be to make links to the latest version redirect to a v/latest/ which redirects to the new latest version across upgrades. For each url v/1.2/docs if 1.2 is the new version, then it redirects to v/latest/docs and when copy-pasted to e.g. stack overflow, when someone comes along later when it's in version 1.5, it serves the v1.5 docs. So the latest Google crawl will see mostly v/latest/docs links, it will always serve those at the top of search results for docs, and then no matter what those search results at the latest version of docs.
- ximeng 8y agoThis would help! There are no direct links between the urls below which both have the same content. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html You have to click to another page and back again to change to the "current" link if you're on the "10" link.
- codetrotter 8y agoThey could straight up disallow the versioned pages in their robots.txt and for the current version they could have a full copy of the docs without version number in the URL that instead has .../current/... and those pages would be allowed for crawlers to index. Then people could jump to older versions manually from there if they needed to instead of everyone having to endure the land-on-an-arbitrary-version-number-page annoyance. That really is my only problem with the postgresql docs though and that’s saying something. The content itself of the postgresql docs is of stellar quality.
- h1d 8y agoNot sure how exactly Google works but if you just block versioned pages out, won't they just not show up instead of somehow pulling the latest static URL in the same ranked position? Maybe better to specify canonical URL as the latest one.
- slavik81 8y agoBlocking the pages in robots.txt will remove them from the Wayback Machine. That sucks. Qt did that for their documentation when they changed ownership and moved their website. They didn't migrate the old documentation, either. This made updating broken links much more difficult because I couldn't easily read the pages they originally pointed to.
- xemoka 8y agoWould defining a canonical page, `<link rel="canonical" href="...">`, be the solution to this?
- jimktrains2 8y agoIt's not canonical though, it's for different versions, they're not the same page.
- majewsky 8y agoMaybe we need <link rel="preferred-search-result">
- jimktrains2 8y agoI wonder if this could be "done" or managed in some way using a sitemap or via google's site search admin (I forget its exact name). Using robots to disallow old versions seems like an awfully big hammer.
- gsich 8y agoThere is a version link at the top.
- JoshMnem 8y agoYou can add a version number to the query to get a specific version: https://www.google.com/search?q=postgres+functions+9.1 https://www.google.com/search?q=postgres+functions+9.1
- karmakaze 8y agoI just follow a near-version link and edit the version number in the URL, then presto.
- gsich 8y agoThis was the first thing I checked, thankfully they stayed the same.
- siruncledrew 8y agoIdk, the examples are really the best part of the documentation to me personally, but they are all the way at the bottom of the page. The description and options sections just remind me of man pages. I would prefer more of a readthedocs style.
- beefhash 8y agoJust hit the "End" key to scroll to the bottom? Incidentally, UNIX/Linux man pages also put the examples section near the end.