On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Ethan A Merritt via gnuplot-beta wrote:
> On Thursday, 28 September, 2017 13:12:37 Karl-Friedrich Ratzsch wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> whenever someone asks google for help on gnuplot, one of the first
>> hits is an online version on sf.net of the html docs for gnuplot 4.2
>>
>> https://www.google.de/search?q=gnuplot+dgrid3d
>>
>> http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs_4.2/node177.html
>>
>> I assume this is because the build process for the html help has
>> been broken for quite some time. For lack of a quick fix for that,
>> it would probably still be better to just remove that outdated stuff?
>
> Google never forgets.
> There's probably no way to remove it from the search results.
>
> A better question is how to persuade Google to return a
> link to current docs rather than to a 10-year-old version.
>
> I have no idea how to do that.
It's true that Google never forgets, but it's also true that Google
is extremely clever. The trouble in this case, I think, is that the
online html doc for gnuplot has never been updated on sourceforge
since version 4.2.
Given the URL
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs_4.2/
try updating it by substituting "4.6" or "5.0" or "5.2" for "4.2"
and you get nothing but 404-errors.
If you start from scratch by googling "gnuplot dgrid3d" the obsolete
4.2 doc comes first, but (at least for me) the relatively up-to-date
http://www.gnuplot.info/demo/dgrid3d.html
comes second (well, actually the order may vary). I can't blame
google for preferring actual documentation to a demo (when that
happens).
If you back up another level and google just "gnuplot documentation"
you get (or at least I get) at first hit
http://www.gnuplot.info/documentation.html
(so exemplifying the old equivocation between www.gnuplot.info and
gnuplot.sourceforge.net as canonical source). But this page just
offers PDF files. Nothing wrong with PDF, but I can see that google
(that is, ultimately, google users) might prefer HTML, however out
of date it may be.
I don't mean to blame anyone -- least of all Ethan, who's doing a
great job as primary gnuplot maintainer/developer these days -- and
I'm afraid I'm not about to volunteer to maintain the gnuplot online
doc myself (too many other fish to fry). But if anyone were willing
to help, certain paths look like they might be promising.
I'm fairly confident that if anyone were to put updated
HTML documentation under, say,
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs_5.0/
that would be picked up quite quickly and displace the old stuff on
google. Or perhaps a redirect could be installed at
http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs_4.2/
to point to whatever is the preferred location for current
documentation.
--
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University
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