It's well known that Exim's documentation is excellent. It's also well
known, on this list anyway, that a lot of people have a hard time
finding answers to their questions on the web.
Just by way of an example, I was recently trying to find out how to pipe
a mail message through a perl script that would squash it down to SMS
size during delivery to an SMS e-mail gateway. I Googled for things like
exim, pipe, sms, perl. What I found was mainly irrelevant
over-6-year-old mailing list messages. Even when I Google for the
totally specific keywords exim and transport_filter (which ideally would
have shown up somewhere in the original search) nothing from exim.org
shows up in the first 6 pages of results.
This pattern is common, and it means that finding correct, up to date,
relevant Exim information is harder than finding information on many
other broadly similar topics (eg, try finding information on mysql
backups, php character encodings, javascript regular expressions, etc).
Which is not to say that the information doesn't exist. It clearly does,
and it's followable and informative. But the problem is knowing where to
look for it in the first place, and people like me (well, me anyway)
have got used to using Google as a universal source of information.
I know I can grep the text documentation, and I can also search on
exim.org directly, but I can't help thinking the world would be a better
place if exim.org was better indexed by Google. I suppose the ideal
would be that a Google search for exim and transport_filter would find a
page like
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.60/doc/html/spec.html/ch24.html#transport_filter.
As it happens, the correct url seems to be
http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.60/doc/html/spec.html/ch24.html#id2626250,
but I don't think this is linked to anywhere on the web.
I don't have any real ideas about how to go about improving the Google
searchability of exim.org, so this is just a rather unhelpful whinge,
but perhaps one that others can relate to, and one that someone
somewhere might be able to mitigate.
Chris
