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.
