MySQL Bugs: #57344: Documentation search on dev.mysql.com is awful

Bug #57344	Documentation search on dev.mysql.com is awful
Submitted:	8 Oct 2010 18:41	Modified:	18 Oct 2010 17:28
Reporter:	Tim Soderstrom	Email Updates:
Status:	Closed	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Websites: MySQL.com	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	Any	OS:	Any (Web)
Assigned to:	Adam Donnison	CPU Architecture:	Any
Tags:	dev.mysql.com, documentation, search, URL

Description:
It used to be that doing something like:

http://dev.mysql.com/enum

Gave reasonable results. Namely, in the above case, the first return would have been:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/enum.html

It seems that moving to Google site-search sometime ago made this worse, but since the Oracle acquisition, it's not, frankly, brilliantly awful. Using Google directly is actually more accurate than MySQL's own site search, which seems totally backwards.

How to repeat:
Search for something specific in the docs, typically specific topics that have their own pages (such as ENUM, CREATE TABLE, etc.):

http://dev.mysql.com/enum

Suggested fix:
Make searching not suck.

Fixed misspelling in Synopsis.

Thank you for the report.

Verified as described.

Honestly specific documentation search works better now.

Perhaps, but the URL-based search is actually both cool and very convenient. The problem is that old forum posts seem to be having a higher priority than the documentation itself. Perhaps if those weights could be adjusted it would be much better?

this has been mentioned before:

http://ronaldbradford.com/blog/why-is-mysql-documentation-search-so-wrong-2010-06-06/

I'd second Tim's comments. 

However, I think that the former search within dev.mysql.com still worked to some degree. The results that now show the Oracle logo at the top are totally useless.

Another vote for this one, at least in the old search you would get a result searching for the title of one of the pages even if you did have to click the "view omitted searches" link. But now you don't get these showing up, the closet you get is a page that has a link to the page you're looking for.

I was hoping the attribute filters might do what I wanted but they seem to be even more random.

Please either fix this or put the old search functionality back as this one is completely useless.

The specific bug as described has been fixed, in that dev.mysql.com/enum now correctly redirects to the ENUM documentation page.

Other improvements are being worked on.

Now instituted better separation of results, with context specific help.  E.g. if you are in the documentation pages when you use the top or bottom page search, searches are limited to the documentation (ignoring forums, for instance). If you use the sidebar search it will limit to the version and language of the current documentation page.

Testing so far is looking promising.

To look at a few others that don't work very well, please compare the results from a Google search to that of the in-site search (adding 'mysql' in Google search cases) for:
'if then'
'group by'

So there is still some issue with how the results are being found. 

However, it's not all bad. For example, searches for 'INSERT', 'Collate' and 'isnull' were fairly comparable.

Closed as the primary bug has been resolved, and various improvements made.

Just wanted to say whatever changes were made have dramatically improved things! Thanks for getting this taken care of quickly!

Just wanted to say whatever changes were made have dramatically improved things! Thanks for getting this taken care of quickly!