Claus Reinke wrote:
What I was actually googling for is "ghc haskell language pragma", and then you get loads of results from manuals before GHC had a language pragma. I don't mean searching to find the documentation, I mean searching to find content within the documentation.
This just shows you how screwed up Google currently is.
i wouldn't go that far, but i have had the impression that its performance doesn't impress me as much as it used to. or perhaps my own google skills have deteriorated. if i know what i'm looking for, it is still great. but when the search items are still cloudy, i sometimes feel as if i was back to altavista, before google came along.
when stumbling across a haskell or ghc problem, i used to be able to find some relevant mailing list threads within a few hours, or if the issue was mingw-related, within an afternoon or so. the time being taken up by finding the right context and keywords to search for, incrementally evolving the search patterns with increasing awareness of context - since i follow haskell daily, but only search mingw for issues, every few months or so, one is easier than the other.
I find the following works quite well for searching the mailing lists: - download all the archives from haskell.org - import them into Thunderbird - use Google Desktop Search, or thunderbird's search On Linux I suppose you'd have to use an alternative to GDS like Beagle or something.
mailing list postings to home in on the right static resources. i have, at times, suspected that google no longer indexes all of haskell.org.
Google has never indexed all the mailing lists on haskell.org properly. I never found out why, although I believe John Peterson looked into it at one stage and concluded that it wasn't easy to fix. Google does index the mirrors though (mailarchive.com, gmane.org). Cheers, Simon