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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lennart Borgman writes:

 > That is perhaps more an opinion? I definitively think users who
 > know Google search well can find the information very quickly that
 > way.

I use Google a lot for various different purposes, and yes, it has an
excellent thesaurus behind it.  You *can* just type "emacs cut" into
Google and expect to get almost as good results as "emacs kill" in
many circumstances.  (But not in this case.  I  get completely
different results, oriented to very different audiences.  It's not
obvious to me that the "How to use Emacs like Nano in 30 seconds"
answers are very good for users -- I think they should probably be
using Nano in the first place if such answers are sufficient.)

 > And new users - who we want to help, of course - probably are very
 > good at that.

Not in my experience.  The same people who are unwilling to spend an
hour learning to use Info also tend to have poor Google foo, and tend
to believe anything that they read in a source from the first page of
results.  YMMV, of course, but that's my experience.

I'll grant you that my experience with Windows and Mac help is "db;gf"
("don't bother; Google first"), and I'm definitely a n00b with respect
to those OSes and the WIMP-y software written for them (25 years after
starting with them ;-).  The analogous effect *could* be true for
Emacs vs new users, but I hope not.  The Emacs manuals have much more,
and much more informative, content.

 > This is not true. You do not have to search the whole internet just
 > because you use Google. You could do something like this:
 > 
 >    Google: "site:www.gnu.org/software/emacs/24.2/manual/ some thing"

A truly horrible search to type, of course.

 > If that folder exists there, of course.

A problem that Info "i" doesn't have.