Related to the topic of redirecting golang.org's documentation pages to pkg.go.dev (#44356), I investigated the use of the search box, to see whether we should keep it around. We should not.
Last Friday I downloaded the most recent 2,500 /search URLs from the golang.org App Engine dashboard and went through them. They spanned 28 hours.
97 were for x/ repo redirects for packages named search, leaving 2,403.
201 were for "Nubo Beauty" or "www.nubobeauty.com" [sic], leaving 2,202.
609 more were URLs that had nothing to do with Go (usually somedomain.cn), leaving 1,592.
Those 1,592 make up 0.0158 QPS over 28 hours, or just under 1 QPM.
There are few enough that you can just read through the list of search terms from that 28-hour period, which I did. Overall it is quite reasonable to turn down search on golang.org in favor of people using Google to find general things or to use pkg.go.dev for packages: there's so little traffic and we answer the queries so badly compared to Google or pkg.go.dev.
It hurts to see people searching for queries like the following, knowing that they got no useful results:
- 1.16
- 1.16beta
- GOPATH
- k8s.io/api/settings/v1alpha1
- language and capacity
- linux installation
- logical operators
- mocking struct
- naming convention
- remove element from slice
- sirupsen/logrus
- string template
- struct field tag
- tutorial
- update go
- using go modules
- visual studio code
The saving grace is that hardly anyone is searching at all. But those that are searching would be better served looking for a proper search engine.
Another takeaway for the package discovery site is that once we have the symbols-per-version info, it would be nice to make searches like "x509.Certificate" work. Those come up as well. That's #44142.
Related to the topic of redirecting golang.org's documentation pages to pkg.go.dev (#44356), I investigated the use of the search box, to see whether we should keep it around. We should not.
Last Friday I downloaded the most recent 2,500 /search URLs from the golang.org App Engine dashboard and went through them. They spanned 28 hours.
97 were for x/ repo redirects for packages named search, leaving 2,403.
201 were for "Nubo Beauty" or "www.nubobeauty.com" [sic], leaving 2,202.
609 more were URLs that had nothing to do with Go (usually somedomain.cn), leaving 1,592.
Those 1,592 make up 0.0158 QPS over 28 hours, or just under 1 QPM.
There are few enough that you can just read through the list of search terms from that 28-hour period, which I did. Overall it is quite reasonable to turn down search on golang.org in favor of people using Google to find general things or to use pkg.go.dev for packages: there's so little traffic and we answer the queries so badly compared to Google or pkg.go.dev.
It hurts to see people searching for queries like the following, knowing that they got no useful results:
The saving grace is that hardly anyone is searching at all. But those that are searching would be better served looking for a proper search engine.
Another takeaway for the package discovery site is that once we have the symbols-per-version info, it would be nice to make searches like "x509.Certificate" work. Those come up as well. That's #44142.