Searchable documentation?

[ivirshup]

There used to be a search bar in the documentation, which now appears to have been removed. For me, this makes the documentation site a lot less helpful.

Is this something that's coming back?

[bryevdv]

Unfortunately, Google shut down "Google Site Search" which powered the old search box (see #5911 for their email) I'd love to have a useful (ad-free) search box. But I don't know how to make that happen. Getting it back will require someone with relevant expertise to decide to step in and help lead the effort.

Bing is a possible alternative:

https://blogs.bing.com/2017-05/build-your-own-web-search-service-with-bing-custom-search
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/bing-custom-search/

We would have to find a way to fund a budget for using it though NumFocus, unless there are any free offerings for OSS projects.

Alternatively, the docs are actually hosted on a server. If there is some indexing engine that we can run ourselves, that might be an option. Again, anyone with expertise would be extremely appreciated to come help make this happen.

[mattpap]

Given that bokeh's docs are indexed by google search nevertheless, as a temporary measure, one can use queries like site:bokeh.pydata.org gmapplot to limit search only to bokeh's website. Also, is there a reason why we don't just use sphinx's (client side) search functionality?

[bryevdv]

Also, is there a reason why we don't just use sphinx's (client side) search functionality?

It's not very good, and requires dumping the entire index into a huge JS blob on every page, IIRC. I'm not sure it would work well with the way we version our docs, either. But maybe things are better, it could be worth a try, too.

[ivirshup]

Out of curiosity, how are the datashader, pyviz, and holoviews sites doing their search?

[jbednar]

We copied the site configuration for all those sites from Bokeh originally, so alas, we have had the same problem Bokeh has; the search now just returns bogus full-web search results. :-(

We'd love to have something set up that's more useful, even if it's just a specially crafted URL for google to focus the search to our site.

[hklarner]

A message explaining the disappearance or a link to this issue in place of the search box would prevent annoyed bewilderment. Its just very uncommon to offer a documentation that is not searchable.

[ivirshup]

Would it be possible to just have the search route you to something like: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:bokeh.pydata.org+inurl:{current_version}+{query}?

[bryevdv]

I didn't have any luck:

I also tried without the {}, and with double quotes around the text. Google does not seem to like the . characters. At one point it also said I was sending suspicious traffic and made me pass a CAPTCHA. So, I can't say that's a promising start. But it gets to my earlier point:

Getting it back will require someone with relevant expertise to decide to step in and help lead the effort.

OSS Is a collaboration. It has to be. There is more work to be done to support hundreds of thousands of users than ~2 people (at present) can possibly ever do alone. if someone with the right experience (or time) can prove this out, get something further along and more demonstrably useful, I'd love to try working it into the docs.

[ivirshup]

Oh, that was kind of a rough f-string style template. A little more formally (using python conventions) it'd be:

f"https://www.google.com/search?q=site:bokeh.pydata.org+inurl:{version_in_url}+{query.replace(' ', '+')}"

For example, searching for "network plot" on the latest docs would send you to https://www.google.com/search?q=site:bokeh.pydata.org+inurl:latest+network+plot

Of course, I'm really glad you're doing the work maintaining this library. I'd love to help fix this, but I don't think I've got the relevant experience to fix it.

[bryevdv]

@ivirshup Ah, until we ditch Python 2 later this year, f-strings are not usable by us so I have not really used them either.

Unfortunately, while that works for "latest" (which was also true of what I tried earlier) it does not work for "1.0.4" again google really seems to hate the dots

I also tried with quotes around the version

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:bokeh.pydata.org+inurl:"1.0.4"+network+plot

[ivirshup]

Ah yeah, I had only checked if it worked for inurl:latest. Anyways, I'd assumed this would get implemented in javascript instead of python, since it only need information from the current page.

So I guess like:

function search(query) {
    ver = window._BOKEH_CURRENT_VERSION
    url = `https://www.google.com/search?q=site:bokeh.pydata.org+${ver}+${query.replace(/ /g, "+")}`
    window.open(url, "_self")
}

So search("network plots interactive") would take you to: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:bokeh.pydata.org+1.0.4+network+plots+interactive

But maybe with some URI cleaning?

[bryevdv]

@ivirshup That's promising! I will see if I am able to incorporate something before the next release

EDIT: well actually, spoke too soon, changing to 1.0.2 and still everything goes to latest: