@Ray - thanks for passing this along.
@Aaron - amazing. Thank you. Any idea when this will kick in? I've just
done a search for "impressions", and I have Russian and Spanish versions
(in English) still turning up, with nav elements highlighted in the
snippet. If I have some idea of the date range, I'll be quiet until then.
Promise :)
Two other tweaks to consider, if I can be so bold - spaces and
capitalisation.
There is a big difference for a dev, between "SearchQuery" and "search
query " and "search_query". Two are likely to be a parameter - meaning
you're looking for a parameter name. The other is plain language - you're
probably looking for a description. In normal Google search the lack of a
space is less meaningful. For devs, less so. Capitalisation is also
meaningful. I may be looking for something called "Impressions" (probably a
variable) and then I don't want to know about "impressions". (probably
general discussion about impressions).
I realise that these are very different from Google's usual behaviour. But
devs are not... normal. :) We can take complex search parameters, and we
recognise capitals and a lot of strange punctuation.
Cheers, JeremyC.
On Thursday, 14 August 2014 16:43:43 UTC+1, Aaron Karp wrote:
>
> Hi Jeremy,
>
> I'm sorry to hear you're having a poor experience with our search feature.
> I'm the product manager for developers.google.com and definitely want to
> get this fixed.
>
> First of all, it looks like we're not treating the left navigation
> properly; it's showing up as the snippet for the search results, which is
> no good. As for the results showing up in other languages, I was able to
> reproduce that as well. I've filed bugs with our engineering team for both
> of these issues and we'll get them fixed ASAP. I'm also noting your
> feedback around prioritizing newer API versions.
>
> Please keep the feedback coming! It's important to me that we have a
> superb search experience on developers.google.com, and while I know we've
> got a ways to go, it's one of our top priorities.
>
> -Aaron
>
>
> On Monday, August 11, 2014 9:45:40 AM UTC-4, Jeremy Chatfield wrote:
>>
>>
>> Go to developers.google.com. Navigate until you're in the AdWords API
>> section. Search for, ohh, "Impressions". Click on the results. Chances are
>> that you be taken to a page that is not in your interface language. You'll
>> be shown English documents (because, hey, it's Google, and translation just
>> isn't a thing, even in 2014). But you may be given "Haku" as your search.
>> Yes, you've been switched to Finnish. I've had language codes I don't even
>> recognise, and I worked in i18n, over a decade ago.
>>
>> What have you done to search, that the worlds' largest international
>> public search engine returns results in random languages?
>>
>> I'm not even going into why the search results are based on the
>> navigation elements of the page rather than the actual content. The number
>> of search results you have to ignore when you search for "search query" is
>> genuinely impressive. It's like search from 1995.
>>
>> The API documentation is hard enough, without having to navigate the site
>> in weird languages, remembering to edit "hl=jp_JA" back to "en", or
>> wondering where any real resource is that deals with "search query" (8 of
>> the first 10 are not relevant, arguably 9, though the key result that
>> should be there, is present; one of the results is in German, one in
>> Portuguese, one in Finnish, one is a flat file presentation suitable for
>> printing, of a real HTML page, FFS). Half the time the results show v201402
>> or even earlier versions, over 201406, etc.
>>
>> I know this is a bit of a rant, but, really, Google is *the* search
>> engine, and the developer resource should have a good representation of
>> search, shouldn't it?
>>
>> I know that technical documentation translation is not easy. Can I point
>> out, though I was head of R&D for a tiny site (<100k users) back in the
>> 2000's, when we did forward and back translation of all pages and
>> navigation, and error corrections, in less than 3 days, in 13 languages,
>> including some right-to-left languages. I'm not the world's best coder or
>> manager, and my little team could get this done. It can not be beyond the
>> wit of Google to MAKE THE SEARCH FUNCTION USABLE. Start by returning a sort
>
