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.

Reply via email to