I can't be the only one who finds Googling Sonar related questions to be frustrating, for the simple reason that the vast majority of results which come up seem to be hopelessly out of date. The forum's search feature is oftentimes completely useless, and I find it difficult to find what I want in Sonar's PDF documentation sometimes, so Google is usually the only viable option. Most of the forum results that seem to come up are from 2012 and earlier, and the official documentation results which come up are in virtually every case from the help pages for Sonar X2 or Sonar X3. 
 
In fact what's even more incredible is that if you filter Google's search results to show only pages from, say, the past couple of years, most of the knowledge base pages which come up are still from X2 and X3. It's either as if their latest documentation has not been indexed properly by Google, or that the SEO for these pages is hopelessly lacking for some reason. 
 
I think Cakewalk needs to take more control of its search engine presence and do more to make sure that up to date information is being served for Sonar related search queries. If X2 and X3 documentation is being heavily prioritized in search results to the almost complete exclusion of current documentation, that's a big problem. Perhaps it's about time for the old online documentation to be retired, or at least flagged as "noindex" so that Google won't index it? 
 
As an example, look what I get if I Google something fundamental to Sonar, like the piano roll: 
 

 
Given that so much has changed in the piano roll since X3, this has to be frustrating to a beginner who is Googling for answers on the go. 

one of those videos is mine. I believe its not as much the search engine as it is no new videos are being made.

Not sure if you know to filter the forum James.
ie:
site:forum.cakewalk.com sonar piano roll

Definitely using site:cakewalk.com 'searchterm' will give better results. Still, I do get a lot of old info

chuckebaby
one of those videos is mine. I believe its not as much the search engine as it is no new videos are being made.

It's not so much the video results that come up - I know Cakewalk has no control over who makes Sonar tutorial videos. It's more the documentation results which come up, which are almost completely skewed toward X2 and X3. 

timidi
Not sure if you know to filter the forum James.
ie:
site:forum.cakewalk.com sonar piano roll

Yeah I know you can filter search results by date, but this has a couple issues: 
 
1) It's a two stage filtration process here, filtering by both site and date
2) This doesn't include official documentation 
 
I know, it's easy for us to say "well if you take these extra steps then you can eventually drill down into what you're looking for." That's just another way of saying "the information is there if you look hard enough." The problem is that in this day and age, people just want to Google something and get an answer in the first page of results. Google's algorithm has a lot to do with this and of course nobody has control over that except Google - however site owners also have a huge role in what appears in search results for particular keywords. 
 
And I also know that we can turn to the huge PDF documentation, or navigate to the Cakewalk site to find the documentation there. However, as many have pointed out in the past, the official documentation isn't organized too well and it's often hard to find exactly what you want without succumbing into an endless circular loop of hyperlinks. 
 
Just to clarify, my problem here is not that I was looking for info on the piano roll. I just used that as an example to illustrate that when you Google basic questions about Sonar functionality - as a huge proportion of users will attempt to do - the search results are usually hopelessly outdated. That has to be a problem. 

If I wanted to search the current documentation for "piano roll" I would open any page at www.cakewalk.com enter piano roll in the search box then filter the results by clicking on SONAR Platinum, Professional, Artist Documentation.

Cakewalk hasn't published a lot since Platinum and the 3rd party stuff has stopped. Old news is what you're going to find until Google allows you to search the future.

ampfixer
Old news is what you're going to find until Google allows you to search the future.

Ooh, I want that feature!
 
Searching for anything on the internet has been a crapshoot since the earliest days (any old-timers remember Archie?). As the sheer volume of information explodes exponentially it just keeps getting harder. Try to look up a person's name who happens to share the same name as, say, a famous pop singer.
 
This is the basic problem with text-based searches. Databases are my life (sad, I know). I write queries all day long for mining information from enormous collections of raw data, and the absolute last resort for finding something is to perform an unqualified text search. You are almost guaranteed loads of irrelevant records.
 
A few tips that might help you when querying via the Google search engine:
 
1. Use quotes. If your search term is a phrase or compound word, quoting it will eliminate a lot of bogus results. For example, "manic compressor" (with the quotes) will avoid hits on air compressors and mental illnesses.
 
2. Use the + symbol. If you type in
        compressor + plugin
that will only return results that contain both words, although not necessarily in that sequence. Without the "+", you'll be back to air compressors again.
 
3. Use the "-" symbol. The opposite of the + sign, putting "-" in front of a word tells the search engine to eliminate results that contain that word.
        west -kanye
will give you records with the word "west" in them, but eliminate the Kanye West references.
 
4. Use wildcards. An asterisk serves as a wildcard character. If you want to find out about SONAR X1 and nothing else, search on
        site:cakewalk.com X* -X2 -X3
This means give me everything that contains words beginning with "X", but not "X2" or "X3".
 
5. Specify whether you want to search titles only or bodies only, using the "allintitle" and "allintext" qualifiers.
        allintitle:PRV
will specifically look in titles for "PRV", and ignore the main text. This can be handy when searching the forum.
        site:forum.cakewalk.com allintitle:bitflipper
will return every forum thread where "bitflipper" occurs in the thread title (11,500 times, turns out).
There are a bunch of other keywords, but I don't ever use them so you'll have to google them.
 
6. Specify the site. This isn't always as straightforward as you might think.
        site:cakewalk.com PRV
will get you not only forum posts with the word "PRV", but also pages from the SONAR help manual, the Cakewalk blogs, marketing material, and CakeTV videos. If you specifically want to search the forum, use
       site:forum.cakewalk.com PRV
If you're looking for a post you made about the PRV that was specific to Platinum, use
       site:forum.cakewalk.com PRV + sharke + Platinum
IF you get a bunch of results about X3, you could exclude it:
       site:forum.cakewalk.com PRV + sharke + Platinum -X3
       
 

I will now add -kanye to ever search I ever do