On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 8:22 AM, R P Herrold herrold@centos.org wrote:
You omit mentioning that (from tracking latencies to appearing) the CentOS site, wiki, MLs, CentOS' planet are all regularly trawled by major search engines. The Forum and the bug tracker are also indexed but less often.
Earlier last year, I noticed Google tended to pick up Forum posts than mailing list posts. To see if this was indeed the case, I searched for several terms in Google and compiled the results in my blog:
http://blog.toracat.org/2009/02/search-is-on-getting-help-for-centos/
Sure enough, Google seems to like Forums better than the MLs. :-P Because that search was getting rather old (15 months ago), I repeated the same set of search yesterday. And the update is here:
http://blog.toracat.org/2010/05/search-is-on-an-update/
Surprisingly, there were very few from the mailing lists in the first Google 50 hits. As I mentioned there, the objective of the search is not to compare which is more "popular" but simply to present the fact that, when people go to Google and do a simple search, they tend to see Forum posts. This in turn means we need to make sure there are no misleading or inappropriate answers. So, you can help there, too.
Akemi / toracat