Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Trying Bing

If I search Google for “NSManagedObjectContext”, the first result is the NSManagedObjectContext Class Reference (Mac) on developer.apple.com. Good. With Bing, in the first ten pages of results, there are only two from developer.apple.com, and they are Core Data Utility Tutorial: Creating the Core Data Stack and iOS Developer Library. Not what I was looking for. Even when I search for “site:developer.apple.com NSManagedObjectContext” it doesn’t find the desired page at all, although it does find the reference pages for NSIncrementalStore and NSManagedObjectID (for iOS). I sympathize with the Bing engineers, since the Apple site uses horrid hash URLs. DuckDuckGo seems to have the same problem.

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Try http://blekko.com/

Interestingly, whereas Google returns the Mac documentation to this class; Blekko returns the iOS version. Neither search engines return both results on the first page.

That's interesting that you can still get Google to give you not only Apple documentation, but the Mac version, even; about 6 months or a year ago I gave up on using Google to get any useful results for Cocoa classes :-( and I now use a search shortcut that uses developer.apple.com's own engine.

I'm so frustrated with the absolutely terrible quality of search results I've been getting from Google for the past year or so (I feel like I've been taken back to the mid-90s, where search engines can't find a bleepin' thing that's not ridiculously common), but everything else I've tried so far has been *much worse* than Google's now-terrible results :-( (And this was all before the "social shenanigans" that are the rage now.)

The DuckDuckGo way would be to run the search as `!appledev NSManagedObjectContext`. With DDG, when you know what information source you want to search already, you use a bang command to jump directly to the search results within that source.

This page is currently the #10 result on Bing for the query, “NSIncrementalStore”

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