| You can put site:haskell.org in your Google query to eliminate all of | those sites. Add inurl:WORD for even greater precision. Good idea. | > Any chance some GHC person could politely request that some of these | > get removed? Having the manual easily searchable is a good thing. I think you are likely to have at least as much success as we are, when it comes to asking people to remove old manuals! S

Hi

why so complicated? try googling for "ghc user guide", and the very first entry, for me, is the latest at haskell.org. in fact, google toolbar suggests this phrase after just typing "ghc".

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.

playing around a bit, something like "ghc/docs/latest flags" seems to work reasonably well. but perhaps an all-in-one version would be better for searching, such as the PDF version.

Or just one big HTML page, the Firefox inline search is quite powerful.

wasn't there a specialized google search for haskell? yup, here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=015832023690232952875%3Acunmubfghzq

And trying that with my above query I get way too much code, and nothing useful - but one to bookmark for the future.

ps. also ask neil. i'm sure there's a secret hoogle flag for this!-)

Not yet (/me adds) Thanks Neil

...

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. whereas these days, i might stumble around for an afternoon in haskell land, without ever finding the right keywords to search for - the gaps are too great, and starting out with vaguely remembered context, are more and more difficult to bridge (such as starting out with a ghc build problem, moving the search to gcc or ld or mingw, narrowing the time window, or remembering a similar issue occurring earlier, moving back to ghc or cvs lists with refined search terms, rinse and repeat, switching between web/ group/blog search, narrowing down to the right mailing list, and the right wrongly-named thread,..). either one finds nothing at all, or lots of material not relevant to the intended, but not yet explicitly known, target. either way, it is no longer easy to use 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. i've known other sites before, who unintentionally modified their instructions for spiders, and disappeared from google results.. could someone at haskell.org check? claus

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).

try googling for "albus dumbledore tutorial haskell". i get 32 results, none from haskell.org. something is very wrong there. checking the simplest things first, here is www.haskell.org/robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /pipermail/ that puts an end to list archive search by any decent search engine's spiders right-away, doesn't it? in fact, the first entry makes me wonder how we get any results at all from haskell.org? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt i don't know how the different wiki formats and redirections affect things, or what the different servers at haskell.org have to say about this. and i know that html pages at haskell.org use the robots meta tag for fine control, but i don't know how robots.txt and robots meta tag interact. i suspect that with that particular robots.txt, google will index nothing, unless someone else points directly at a page, and that page's meta tag allows indexing. cleaning up that robots.txt should help, but someone must have put it there for a reason? claus