On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > * Michel Rodriguez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2004-02-16 10:57]: > > (At least the Perl-XML folks got it right, props to Grant > > McLean!). > > You don't put yourself in a particular spot on Google, you just > get there by being linked from lots of places. You have zero > control over whether and where you appear in the results for a > query. > > > there is no single URL for the latest docs of a module, so they > > are never properly indexed by search engines. > > Did you try searching for a module name? Go look up, I dunno, > "Compress::Zlib" or something on Google.
The 2 things are linked: if people know that there is single, static page to link to when articles, web pages, posts on perlmonks of messages in mewsgroups or in archived mailing lists, then this page will rise through Google rankings and come up when people search for perl and a relevant term. As for finding Compress::Zlib... If you already know what you are looking for, then of course you will find it. In this case a naive user would be lucky though, as 'perl+gzip' returns a link to the doc for Nick Clark's PerlIO-gzip-0.15 (which doesn't have any link to download the module itself, drat!). I think having a convention to link to http://search.cpan.org/dist/* would give these pages a chance to be more visible for programers who don't know about CPAN, or who are overwhelmed by it. The remaining problem I see is that the dist/ pages contain only the one-line description for the module, so there is a risk there that some useful keywords might be missing (Compress::Zlib mentions the zlib library but not gzip for example). Improvement ideas welcome... -- Michel Rodriguez Perl & XML http://www.xmltwig.com
