Re: Have you all gone crazy? Was: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Tom]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:
> 
> And if you do know, how is this different from going to the same
> manual and using the text search (the 's' command) there?  It isn't.
> 

The main difference is google finds alternative phrases too.

E.g. suppose you want to read about closing buffers. You try
i and it has no completion for closing buffer. If you try to search
for "close buffer" in the emacs manual then no matches come up.
(Note I tried it on 24.1, a newer emacs might give better results.)

The reason for this is emacs calls it killing a buffer. But the
feature is generally called closing in other apps (close window,
close file, etc.), so a new user probably uses this for searching.

So in order to find something in info you often need to know the
term emacs uses for it. Info is a great reference, becase it is quick to
look up something when you already know the term. But if you have only
a vague idea then it may not be so easy to find what you are looking
for.

With google on the other hand if you search for "emacs close buffer"
(no quotes) then kill buffer is the top result. You can also search for 
"emacs close file", because a new user may be used to this term
(close file) from other apps and google gives useful results for this
too.

You can add these alternatives to the index, but in practice you
can't compete with google with a manually compiled index, because
you can add just so many alternatives, while google does the same
mechanically and intelligently (stemming, thesaurus, etc.), so
it will always have an advantage.

The most useful solution could be submitting a search to google
when info gives no results and if there is a manual hit in the
search results then determine the info page from the manual link
and show the page info. But I understand it won't happen, because it's
SaaS.