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If there's something that would kill Go language, then it's name.

I find it very hard to find anything in web related just by using "Go" in the query. The word is on of the most frequent in English. So I see everything in the result except Go-related stuff. Even Google, who sponsors the language and famous for tracking anything I search, can not track I'm a programmer so interested in the programming language and not English grammar.

How to search for information related to the programming language itself, excluding the results related to English grammar?

Imagine for example a blog post where someone mentions his observation about Go. He probably won't use the easy-to-search sentence like "go programming language", maybe something "there's one thing I like about Go".

gnat
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Maksee
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5 Answers5

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One can also use "golang" as a search term. It works fine to catch the content from the Go mailing lists.

Botond Sipos
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As others have pointed out, golang (and its variants) seems to work at the moment. I'll also add that I don't think we should have to pick names of products, projects, or services based solely on search optimization. Other one, two, or three letter languages seem to be rather searchable. "C" isn't exactly the best name for a language but it seems to be rather searchable. As web content for Go becomes more prolific, I imagine it'll improve.

The world isn't perfectly parsable. If I were in Google's shoes, I would almost take it as a personal challenge to pick names on preference regardless of any perceived searchability up front.

As a side note, if a name as simple and universal as Go is enough to kill the language, it has no business becoming mainstream anyway. That said, the language is out there the implementation is open source, it could dwindle in use, but it will never die. Languages have a way of doing that.

Nate
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  • Good points about picking the name. Unfortunately some of the editors took the smiley out of my first sentence so the "killing" in it started looking more serious – Maksee Aug 01 '12 at 04:03
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I find that "go language" seems to give fairly accurate results. If there is a specific topic tacking that onto the end should work fine.

firelore
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  • It's interesting, I tried this way a couple of days ago and there were much less results about the language. I'm not sure, but maybe some human is fine tuning... – Maksee Jul 31 '12 at 12:47
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I find reasonable results with the search term "google go".

Not sure if there are third party and forum sites that that misses, but it seems to get the main stuff.

SnowMonkey
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  • looks like [Google Go Grammar] shows first three results related probably because the pages are hosted at google.com. – Maksee Jul 31 '12 at 11:23
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Answering myself with a little hint I found Bing search engine has an interesting operator linkfromdomain. The search restricts results to pages that were linked from mentioned domain. Sure, stackoverflow.com is good choice for this. So anyone searching for Go related information (for example [Go inheritance]) can query Bing with

linkfromdomain:stackoverflow.com Go inheritance

and get much more programming-related information than with usual queries.

Maksee
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