Almost 50% of Splunk Documentation is missing

[jumper4000]

It's getting worse and worse. Many many Google links, search links, Splunk Answers links, are all leading to missing documentation and dead links. Has anyone else noticed this? Will this be fixed?

[ChrisG · Accepted solution]

The documentation is definitely not missing. Go to docs.splunk.com and search there; the results are reliable.

There are a lot of out-of-date links. There was a substantial reorganization to the Splunk docs for Splunk 5.0. It is taking the Google indexers a long time to catch up.

There are also many postings on Answers that point to old URLs. That is frustrating, I agree...the best bet when you encounter a link like this is--again--to search on docs.splunk.com for the topic.

[jumper4000]

Thank you.

[ChrisG]

Update, 12/31/12: piebob and I have gone through 1000 answers and updated the links so they work (and will work permanently). And the Splunk web development team has some things in the works that should help the Google search issues longer-term.

[ChrisG]

Yes...the Splunk web team is working on some fixes that should help with the Google situation. And there are some improvements in the works for the Splunk docs site search as well. At the moment, that is still your best bet for finding the information you need.

For the broken links in Answers, it would require manually editing all the posts with links in them. There's no simple redirect we could put in place that would handle the change.

[jumper4000]

I agree, it is EXTREMELY frustrating. Often, Google does a better job at finding answers than the Splunk search engine, but lately, it's very frequent that the link found by Google doesn't exist anymore. Splunk should have done a better job at maintaining previous links when they shuffled their documents.