Re: Fixing Google Search on the docs (redux)

Hi,

On 2020-11-18 18:28:49 +0100, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> We've discussed this many times before, and I think so far they've all
> bogged down at "google suck" :) The problem is that they don't even
> consider the case like we have where the pages *aren't* identical, but
> yet related.

Is any search engine better at this? I don't think so?

> The problem it usually comes down to is that if we do that, then you
> will no longer be able to say search for something in the old docs *at
> all*.

I think that'd still be better than the current situation. But I hope we
can do better:

> A good example right now might be that recovery.conf stuff goes
> away. Even if you explicitly search for "postgresql recovery.conf 11".
> And I'd guess the majority of people are actually looking for things
> in versions that are NOT the latest (though an even bigger majority of
> people will be looking for things in versions that are not 9.1).

E.g. not applying canonical when there's no newer version.

> I don't know of any way to actually tell google to prioritise the new
> versions. You used to be able to do this using the sitemap.xml stuff,
> which is why we do that, but at some point they just stopped caring
> about those, even in the cases where we're *lowering* our own
> priority, under the argument of not letting us increase our priority.

Have we evaluated not using canonical, but not including old versions in
the sitemap?

Greetings,

Andres Freund