python docs search for 'print'

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Sep 4 18:58:52 EDT 2012


On 9/4/2012 6:32 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 1:58 PM, David Hoese <dhoese at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> A friend made me aware of this:
>>> When a python beginner (2.x) quick searches for "print" on
>>> docs.python.org,
>>> the print function doesn't even come up in the top 20 results.
>
> In the Windows Help version of the docs, enter print in the index tab
> and print builtin function is at the top. Same is true of the online
> index. (There are only three 'print' entries. There is a duplicate for
> the builtin and one for the fixer. Moral: look for things that would be
> indexed in the index. Searching for a word in text, especially a common
> one like print, brings in lots of junk.

Search rather blindly searches pages for words. As an experiment, I 
entered 'print' on the search tab of the 3.3 Windows-version doc. It 
found 193 pages containing 'print'. The builtin functions page was 
ranked 75. It is a fairly long page with just 3 occurences of 'print'.

To repeat, use the index to find defining entries for Python objects.

If someone wants to volunteer to write a more intelligent search 
algorithm, that incorporates info from the index and markup, feel free.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy




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