[devjab]

I’m a software developer, have been for two decades. I was suspecting it may be the case which is why I asked. Again, I’m not meaning to be rude or snide or anything, but what do you use search engines for? I almost never use them, I tend to head directly to the documentation when I need to look up the APIs for a library.

This is mainly because “free” search engines suck at it these days, and I’m curious if Kagi doesn’t.

[Mashimo]

How do you find the documentation in the first place? ;-)

I search for Errors / StackTraces that I get. For me stackoverflow / reddit / forum answers are often more helpful.

Or examples on how to implement something, the documentation can sometimes be a bit lacking on how to set things together. Give me some working code that I can fiddle with.

High level comparison between two frameworks / libs that I'm not familiar with.

[devjab]

> How do you find the documentation in the first place?

Typically I’ll go directly to the online documentation from one of my bookmarks. Sometimes I’ll have a local version. I did use to just type the thing I was looking for into the google search bar in Firefox, but once the results started being for ridiculous articles (or similar), rather than the actual documentation I started using bookmarks. Which was sort of why I was curious.

> the documentation can sometimes be a bit lacking on how to set things together

If you have the time I’d love to see an example of some random person on the internet giving you a better introduction into using a language library than the documentation itself. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

That being said, I think we simply work on very different things. I’m not sure what searching for an error in my code would help me achieve that reading the error output wouldn’t. I suspect this is because you may be stringing together a lot of frameworks and possibly higher level external libraries, that you’re perhaps not too familiar with? Which would also explain why the documentation you have to work with isn’t always very good.

[Mashimo]

> but once the results started being for ridiculous articles (or similar), rather than the actual documentation I started using bookmarks. Which was sort of why I was curious.

Still works for me. When I search for "Angular signal documentation" I get to the right place (They just changed domain for the brand new version, but .. yeah) That said I also use an ad blocker.

Currently google still works for me.

> If you have the time I’d love to see an example of some random person on the internet giving you a better introduction into using a language library than the documentation itself. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

Can't remember a good example right now. Most recent trouble that I search for was the good old classic of centering a div in CSS :) I think I used a mixture of this side [1] and an LLM ( Github co pilot)

Uh, now I found a small example. When I want to know how to sort a stream in java. When I search for "java 17 stream" go to the official documentation and search for sort I get: [2] more or less it just says "Stream<T> sorted(Comparator<? super T> comparator)"

But when I google "java stream sort" and the first stack overflow contains a great example: [3] or a bit short answer on the same page [4] Those code examples just work better for my brain :)

[1] https://www.w3schools.com/csS/css_align.asp [2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base... [3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/53183266 [4] https://stackoverflow.com/a/40518343

[devjab]

Thanks for sharing. I guess Google is still king for some things. Most official documentations I work with are good on their own, I think the C# (really .Net in general) is perhaps the hardest to traverse. But that is mostly because there is so much of it for so many versions, and here a search engine typically doesn’t do much better than their own search.

I use LLMs, almost exclusively as fancy auto-complete because I’ve never had a computation result from them that wasn’t wrong. I think I would frankly ask one before I use Google though. I used ChatGPT for a recipe the other day. For baking very basic bread which I sort of know how to do, or at least well enough to spot a terrible recipe even though I can’t do it without one. The three results I clicked on Google were worse than the chat bot, though to be fair, two of them were just advertisements and probably written by an LLM.