GHC Manuals online

[Claus Reinke]

>> What I was actually googling for is "ghc haskell language pragma", and
>> then you get loads of results from manuals before GHC had a language
>> pragma. I don't mean searching to find the documentation, I mean
>> searching to find content within the documentation.
> 
> This just shows you how screwed up Google currently is.

i wouldn't go that far, but i have had the impression that its performance
doesn't impress me as much as it used to. or perhaps my own google skills
have deteriorated. if i know what i'm looking for, it is still great. but when
the search items are still cloudy, i sometimes feel as if i was back to altavista,
before google came along.

when stumbling across a haskell or ghc problem, i used to be able to find 
some relevant mailing list threads within a few hours, or if the issue was 
mingw-related, within an afternoon or so. the time being taken up by finding 
the right context and keywords to search for, incrementally evolving the 
search patterns with increasing awareness of context - since i follow 
haskell daily, but only search mingw for issues, every few months or so, 
one is easier than the other. 

whereas these days, i might stumble around for an afternoon in haskell
land, without ever finding the right keywords to search for - the gaps are 
too great, and starting out with vaguely remembered context, are more 
and more difficult to bridge (such as starting out with a ghc build problem, 
moving the search to gcc or ld or mingw, narrowing the time window, or 
remembering a similar issue occurring earlier, moving back to ghc or cvs
lists with refined search terms, rinse and repeat, switching between web/
group/blog search, narrowing down to the right mailing list, and the right
wrongly-named thread,..). 

either one finds nothing at all, or lots of material not relevant to the intended,
but not yet explicitly known, target. either way, it is no longer easy to use
mailing list postings to home in on the right static resources. i have, at times, 
suspected that google no longer indexes all of haskell.org. i've known other 
sites before, who unintentionally modified their instructions for spiders, and 
disappeared from google results.. could someone at haskell.org check?

claus