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Searching for max-age to find information about cache-control doesn't work well #1577
Description
MDN URL
What specific section or headline is this issue about?
Response Directives max-age
What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=max-age doesn't yield anything particularly useful
And the quick search is even less useful:
What did you expect to see?
Ideally searching for max-age should show something relating to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Cache-Control#response_directives (max-age)
Do you have any supporting links, references, or citations?
No response
Do you have anything more you want to share?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Caching talks about max-age , but afaict it doesn't link to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Cache-Control
Activity
hamishwillee commentedon May 18, 2026
The search engine will be picking the case that it does because
max-ageis in the header, and it will prioritize that kind of result. I wouldn't expect it to come up particularly based on "response header" since it is both a response and a request header directive in the "Cache-Control" and also appears in quite a lot of other headers.@caugner Is there something we should do about this? I scrolled through four pages with "max-age" in search bar and did not find it. In Google search syntax that would at least prioritise the string of
max-ageover all the things it picks up that happen to have "max" or "age" in them.caugner commentedon May 18, 2026
Ideally the search for "max-age" should point the user to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Cache-Control#max-age, but by current design the search dialog uses a compact search index ordered by page popularity with only the page titles.
The full text search is something we plan to improve in the next 12 months or so, and we might be able to address this case. It might be that Elasticsearch treats "max-age" as two words, rather than a keyword, and assigns the page a low relevancy for "max-age", because the page covers several different directives.
jsoref commentedon May 21, 2026
In the interim, could the
Guides/Cachingpage grow some extra links to pages that document the attributes it mentions? And if it did, would that help anything?(I appreciate and applaud the long term design improvements, but I'm wondering if there are some simpler things that could be done now to help hapless devs.)
caugner commentedon Jul 9, 2026
This would be a question for @mdn/http.
jsoref commentedon Jul 9, 2026
I can't tell if that's a team reference (github certainly isn't telling me it's a team reference) or a directive for me to make a new ticket somewhere...
hamishwillee commentedon Jul 12, 2026
@jsoref It's a team reference: I am a member.
My intuition is that this would make no difference to search on MDN. The quick search appears to prioritise search-term in the headings, so additional in-source links won't help there. The full search is not finding existing links to max-age, and adding more won't help.
Yes it would - just not search on MDN.
The https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Caching doc is fairly core to info about caching but has no links to
Cache-Controlor any directives that are mentioned. The expectation is that we shoud link on first mention in text, and we might also reasonably mention at leastCache-Controlin a## See alsosection at the end.That will help users navigating to find more information. It might also help with Google search, and MDN search if it prioritizes link text tokens.
PS Would you be able to do that PR?