Re: Bug? Bash manual not indexable by search engines

[Richard Marmorstein]

Oh you are completely right. I found "bashref" via a search for "bash
manual" on DuckDuckGo which gave me an unindexed notice (Screenshot
attached).

When I search on Google.com, though, it finds the landing page you
mentioned -- with links to a version of the manual that is indexed.

Sorry if I've wasted your time! The problem is my search engine is bad at
indexing.






On Sat, May 25, 2019, 5:05 PM Eduardo A. Bustamante López <dualbus@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, May 25, 2019 at 02:56:43PM -0400, Richard Marmorstein wrote:
> > There was discussion on Twitter today
> > (https://twitter.com/PttPrgrmmr/status/1132351142938185728) about how
> the
> > Bash manual appears to not be indexable by search engines.
> >
> > https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html
> > redirects to
> > https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/bash/manual/bash.html, and
> > www.gnu.org/robots.txt
> > has
> > "Disallow: /savannah-checkouts/"
> >
> > We reasoned that this probably wasn't deliberate and wanted to report it.
>
> Hmmm, interesting. How did you get to <
> https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html>?
>
> I went to: <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/>, which is the "landing
> page" (?)
> for Bash. That has:
>
> > Documentation
> >
> > *Documentation for Bash* is available online, as is documentation for
> most GNU
> > software. You may also find more information about Bash by running info
> bash or
> > man bash, or by looking at /usr/doc/bash/, /usr/local/doc/bash/, or
> similar
> > directories on your system. A brief summary is available by running bash
> --help.
>
> The "Documentation for Bash" text includes a link to:
> <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/>, which then links to:
> <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html> (i.e. it's
> "bash.html", not "bashref.html").
>
> Furthermore, if I search for "bash manual" in Google (i.e.
> <https://www.google.com/search?q=bash+manual>), the top three results
> (for me)
> are:
>
> 1. <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/>
> 2. <https://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/bash.pdf>
> 3. <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/index.html>
>
> So, it looks like the manual IS indexable?
>
>
> I searched for "https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html"; in
> Google
> too, and I can see it's referenced from a couple of <
> https://news.ycombinator.com>
> user submitted posts, but that's it.
>

Screenshot_20190525-171536.jpg
Description: JPEG image