The book dead links have gotten so bad that the real book isn't even in search results

[kornelski]

At the moment if you search for "rust raw pointers" on Google (DDG is even worse), you get:

1. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/first-edition/raw-pointers.html which is an outdated stub.

2. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/raw-pointers.html which is another outdated stub.

3. https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.30.0/book/first-edition/raw-pointers.html which has some content, but it's clearly marked as outdated.

4. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.pointer.html — finally some content that isn't outdated, but it isn't the book.

and then follows a bunch of links to StackOverflow, Reddit, and blogs. I can't find the actual, up-to-date contentful version of the book on several result pages. It looks like the stubs have completely pushed it out of the search results!

Search results for this and many other Rust-related queries are irritating garbage. Please, please, please, block the useless pages from crawlers.

[steveklabnik]

This is a duplicate of many, many issues, so I’m going to close it. Thanks.

[kornelski]

Is there any action taken on this? What can I do to help fix it?

[steveklabnik]

Two examples of open issues tracking this are rust-lang/rust#18558 and rust-lang/rust#9461 as well as rust-lang/rust#44687 in some sense

What can I do to help fix it?

We need a plan of action first. Some of the constraints on this plan:

1. it has to work well with docs offline as well as online
2. offline docs cannot use a local web server
3. the contents of older doc versions cannot be modified

changing these constraints is possible, but requires an RFC. If you have any ideas, maybe work on the start of a plan and open an internals thread, and we can discuss there? I do care about this issue, it's just complex and the number of helping hands is small. Some help would be great :)

[kornelski]

I've opened internals thread here: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/deadlock-about-fixing-outdated-documentation-links-in-search-engines/9374