Funny -- I've used Python and its online docs for many years and never used their search, I always use Google. :-) Google search with site:docs.python.org does a somewhat better job: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=string...

Part of the problem is the use of Sphinx and its search engine (at least this was the case a year ago), where searching happens client-side in JavaScript. This limits how complex the search engine can be, before it is to slow or require to much data to download. Last time I looked it had a simple inverse index with a Porter stemmer and limited ranking of results.

This is great for documentation of most projects as it can be supported with only html+css+js, without a need for a web framework and hosting. But for the documentation of a major programming language I think something more advanced is expected.

The documentation for Python is mediocre at best, which is a wart of how documenting Python works. I think the newer Sphynx site is actually a regression from what they had in the Python 2.5 days.