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Because the page you've linked has 24,599 words in total, out of which only 43 words are dedicated to "str.endswith". You can make a beefy SEO article specifica

Because the page you've linked has 24,599 words in total, out of which only 43 words are dedicated to "str.endswith". You can make a beefy SEO article specifically on this method by talking about it a bit, and then providing a lot of examples in various different scenarios. The bottom line being that there is nothing you can do about it unless Python themselves fundamentally change how the documentation is structured, which I doubt they have plans to do.

wpietri 3y ago
Honestly, changing the way they do it is a fine idea. Massive documentation pages were how we did it in the olden days. And I think they're still good for when you want to read through and get an understanding of the whole library. But having that also broken up into a lot of small pages that link back to the main doc would be really helpful to people who are searching for specific solutions. I think that could mostly be done in an automated fashion to start. Then into the master doc you can start adding hinting and extra material that gets rendered into the sub-pages. So it could be approached gradually.
- jenscow 3y ago
  You're not wrong, but I think now the majority don't want an understanding, they just want answers.
zb3 3y ago
I really hope they don't enshittify their documentation just to rank in Google.
miloignis 3y ago
I disagree - Google can and should modify their algorithms until the site that users actually want is first. Tracking which sites users click on for those searches, or maybe which sites users with those searches click on last should give a pretty strong signal that python.org should be ranked far above the spam farms no matter what the content percentage difference is. Content percentage is a clearly gameable metric that shouldn't outweigh other factors. I'm honestly surprised Google employees haven't fixed this somehow, surely they have thousands of people running into this problem daily.
- imchillyb 3y ago
  > Google can and should modify their algorithms until the site that users actually want is first. Why? Google is an ad company, that has integrated search. Why would they cut their own bottom line in order to make data happy? You aren’t their customer. You are Google’s data. Google’s customers buy your data. Why would they change anything about their business model, which works amazingly well?
  - criddell 3y ago
    > Google’s customers buy your data AFAIK, Google doesn’t sell user data.
    - imchillyb 3y ago
      > https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
  - mint2 3y ago
    Because not paying attention to the quality of the product means google is A-okay with the normal brand arc and is on the part where the brand cuts quality to boost profits while coasting on name recognition- I.e the enshittification phase. They can coast for an indeterminate amount of time, but with the risk that eventually the consumer will be fed up and stop using them, especially if a decent alternative pops up.
    - imchillyb 3y ago
      Decent alternatives have been bandied about here for over a decade. Guess what? There are none. Google’s business model is selling user data to the highest bidder. Google’s other business model is selling opportunity to collect data on people. You as a search user are not a customer, but a data point. There is literally no incentive for this to change. Desiring an ad company to not show ads is a ridiculous desire.
jks 3y ago
Somehow kagi.com manages to rank the top results better than Google: - a stackoverflow answer that has a useful example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18351977/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/18351977/ - the Python documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html - Pandas documentation (they also have an endswith): https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.Series.str.endswith.html https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.Series.s... - a blog post on Python regular expressions (this looks useful but is a wrong result for this query): https://www.johndcook.com/blog/python_regex/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/python_regex/ - something that could be a content farm with rephrased Python documentation: https://pythontic.com/concepts/string/introduction https://pythontic.com/concepts/string/introduction The top three results are good, and I guess it's a matter of taste whether the succinct Stackoverflow answer is better than the verbose official documentation.
- micah94 3y ago
  You can also raise/lower domains in kagi. So if you're a python developer, you can boost docs.python.org to personalize your results.
- kalupa 3y ago
  "somehow" is due to their different income model from google. their customers are their search users, not advertisers, so it's not surprising they serve the people that pay them. I'm a very, very happy Kagi user due to this!
hedora 3y ago
Aren't you describing the exact problem that Page Rank was supposed to fix? We've come full circle.
JohnFen 3y ago
> unless Python themselves fundamentally change how the documentation is structured, which I doubt they have plans to do. Nor should they, in my opinion. Quality of documentation is more important than that.
mrguyorama 3y ago
>The bottom line being that there is nothing you can do Google's ENTIRE JOB is to surface the CORRECT content for a query. If they are objectively not doing that, then they are in the wrong. Imagine credit card fraud just kept increasing, and instead of adapting and improving their systems, companies just threw up their hands and said "deal with it, not our problem, nothing we can do" as you had to generate a new credit card number every other day because even the most trivial card number enumeration attacks were not stopped. The fact that google is completely unwilling to change how they operate to prevent even the simplest, intern driven SEO trash from overtaking literally authoritative sources should be exhibit A in a trial to break up Google, as evidence of how negative value they are to the consumer. It's the rough equivalent of Fedex just throwing away a third of the packages they are supposed to deliver at random, and people seemingly just saying "eh, nothing can be done"
- 93po 3y ago
  > Google's ENTIRE JOB is to surface the CORRECT content for a query Google's job is to serve ads profitably. It's something like 90% of their profit (80% of revenue). To some extent they even have an incentive to show poorer results first because it makes you stay on the page longer and look at more sites (more ad impressions).
  - kalupa 3y ago
    in to boost this thinking. "correct" is only relevant for profitability of the advertising stream
svaha1728 3y ago
Kagi has a simple fix for this. It’s not a hard problem to solve, they just have no incentive to solve it.
- thiht 3y ago
  Kagi's solution to pin, bump or blacklist some websites is awesome. It's a shame Google doesn't have something as simple and elegant after all these years.

wpietri 3y ago

Honestly, changing the way they do it is a fine idea. Massive documentation pages were how we did it in the olden days. And I think they're still good for when you want to read through and get an understanding of the whole library. But having that also broken up into a lot of small pages that link back to the main doc would be really helpful to people who are searching for specific solutions. I think that could mostly be done in an automated fashion to start. Then into the master doc you can start adding hinting and extra material that gets rendered into the sub-pages. So it could be approached gradually.

jenscow 3y ago
You're not wrong, but I think now the majority don't want an understanding, they just want answers.

zb3 3y ago

I really hope they don't enshittify their documentation just to rank in Google.

miloignis 3y ago

I disagree - Google can and should modify their algorithms until the site that users actually want is first. Tracking which sites users click on for those searches, or maybe which sites users with those searches click on last should give a pretty strong signal that python.org should be ranked far above the spam farms no matter what the content percentage difference is. Content percentage is a clearly gameable metric that shouldn't outweigh other factors. I'm honestly surprised Google employees haven't fixed this somehow, surely they have thousands of people running into this problem daily.

imchillyb 3y ago
> Google can and should modify their algorithms until the site that users actually want is first. Why? Google is an ad company, that has integrated search. Why would they cut their own bottom line in order to make data happy? You aren’t their customer. You are Google’s data. Google’s customers buy your data. Why would they change anything about their business model, which works amazingly well?
- criddell 3y ago
  > Google’s customers buy your data AFAIK, Google doesn’t sell user data.
  - imchillyb 3y ago
    > https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
- mint2 3y ago
  Because not paying attention to the quality of the product means google is A-okay with the normal brand arc and is on the part where the brand cuts quality to boost profits while coasting on name recognition- I.e the enshittification phase. They can coast for an indeterminate amount of time, but with the risk that eventually the consumer will be fed up and stop using them, especially if a decent alternative pops up.
  - imchillyb 3y ago
    Decent alternatives have been bandied about here for over a decade. Guess what? There are none. Google’s business model is selling user data to the highest bidder. Google’s other business model is selling opportunity to collect data on people. You as a search user are not a customer, but a data point. There is literally no incentive for this to change. Desiring an ad company to not show ads is a ridiculous desire.

jks 3y ago

Somehow kagi.com manages to rank the top results better than Google: - a stackoverflow answer that has a useful example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18351977/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/18351977/ - the Python documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html - Pandas documentation (they also have an endswith): https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.Series.str.endswith.html https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.Series.s... - a blog post on Python regular expressions (this looks useful but is a wrong result for this query): https://www.johndcook.com/blog/python_regex/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/python_regex/ - something that could be a content farm with rephrased Python documentation: https://pythontic.com/concepts/string/introduction https://pythontic.com/concepts/string/introduction The top three results are good, and I guess it's a matter of taste whether the succinct Stackoverflow answer is better than the verbose official documentation.

micah94 3y ago
You can also raise/lower domains in kagi. So if you're a python developer, you can boost docs.python.org to personalize your results.
kalupa 3y ago
"somehow" is due to their different income model from google. their customers are their search users, not advertisers, so it's not surprising they serve the people that pay them. I'm a very, very happy Kagi user due to this!

hedora 3y ago

Aren't you describing the exact problem that Page Rank was supposed to fix? We've come full circle.

JohnFen 3y ago

> unless Python themselves fundamentally change how the documentation is structured, which I doubt they have plans to do. Nor should they, in my opinion. Quality of documentation is more important than that.

mrguyorama 3y ago

>The bottom line being that there is nothing you can do Google's ENTIRE JOB is to surface the CORRECT content for a query. If they are objectively not doing that, then they are in the wrong. Imagine credit card fraud just kept increasing, and instead of adapting and improving their systems, companies just threw up their hands and said "deal with it, not our problem, nothing we can do" as you had to generate a new credit card number every other day because even the most trivial card number enumeration attacks were not stopped. The fact that google is completely unwilling to change how they operate to prevent even the simplest, intern driven SEO trash from overtaking literally authoritative sources should be exhibit A in a trial to break up Google, as evidence of how negative value they are to the consumer. It's the rough equivalent of Fedex just throwing away a third of the packages they are supposed to deliver at random, and people seemingly just saying "eh, nothing can be done"

93po 3y ago
> Google's ENTIRE JOB is to surface the CORRECT content for a query Google's job is to serve ads profitably. It's something like 90% of their profit (80% of revenue). To some extent they even have an incentive to show poorer results first because it makes you stay on the page longer and look at more sites (more ad impressions).
- kalupa 3y ago
  in to boost this thinking. "correct" is only relevant for profitability of the advertising stream

svaha1728 3y ago

Kagi has a simple fix for this. It’s not a hard problem to solve, they just have no incentive to solve it.

thiht 3y ago
Kagi's solution to pin, bump or blacklist some websites is awesome. It's a shame Google doesn't have something as simple and elegant after all these years.