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Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#171

Post by ornornor »

kerpotgh wrote: post #80
throw_away1525 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Putin himself could read your searches, would you care? I guess don't use Yandex if you're a Ukrainian soldier but otherwise what are you worried about?

Yes, there’s no telling how states like Russia secure that information, disseminate it to other paying customers, leak info about high value citizens to use as kompromat etc.

That’s a double standard because you could swap yandex and Russia with google and US and also have a very plausible scenario of what’s happening right now.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#172

Post by valdiorn »

mech422 wrote: post #128
suddenclarity wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe different definitions of Google fu? I can't recall the number of times coworkers claim to have googled something for half an hour that I manage to find on the first or second attempt. Maybe you overestimate the skill of the average Joe?

I just meant that half the time google ignores what you give it...

Which means you need google-fu skills to know how to coerce it into doing what you actually want.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#173

Post by valdiorn »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #74
throw_away1525 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what does your 2023 google fu look like?

I have no idea how to answer that, because it depends on what I'm looking for, and involves making sure I have the terms that go with the subject I'm looking for.

That IS google-fu :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#174

Post by nekopa »

Xeophon wrote: post #124
Euphorbium wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have moved to scinapse.io and it is great. Scholar is dead.

Sadly they do not seem to have all the papers. ArXiV is missing completely, e.g. searching for „Attention is all you need“ does not return the paper which has been published on NeurIPS

I found it on there. It seems to include ArXiV.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#175

Post by quectophoton »

user3939382 wrote: post #46

Kagi. DDG/Bing are ridiculous with ignoring your search terms, even with quotes. I had enough. Google often has a whole page or almost a whole page of clever-widgets before any actual results, not to mention my ethical objections to their behavior and the SEO spam. Kagi works great, I like the fact that I'm paying for it and my interests are primary in the relationship.

The only thing keeping me away from Kagi is that they are US-based.

Having some presence in the EU would contribute to peace of mind that your personal data is more or less under jurisdiction of the GDPR, and that there's at least _some_ pressure to actually keep their word on privacy (as small as that pressure turns out to be in practice).

Maybe not the search queries themselves, but at least keep the user information (payment data, personal preferences, etc) within the EU.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#176

Post by ekanes »

zelias wrote: post #9

I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for

Re: Reddit -- I'd love for YC to issue a Request For Startups around verified human identity - soon it will be hard to distinguish people from AI that posts comments, participates and then astroturfs sites like reddit. Account creation date will help as a band-aid but isn't the right solution.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#177

Post by nvarsj »

zelias wrote: post #9

I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for

Oh god don't give this away, or it will be ruined.

I've said it before but for me the best search I ever used was back in the day when delicio.us was a thing and everyone used it. Basically curated tags/websites, I could find really good, niche things that google would never find for me.

Basically, human powered indexing is almost always better than algo/crawler search which only surfaces popular/gamed pages - it's a fundamental flaw of pagerank type crawling.

This is also kinda why ChatGPT is good, because it's basically a model trained on places like reddit, not using link popularity or whatever. So it's basically a model which builds an index of information from actual humans. I think it's the future of search, albeit with its own anti SEO challenges.

For now we have site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, site:stackoverflow.com, site:wikipedia.com to actually get useful info out of Google.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#178

Post by Veen »

eimrine wrote: post #43

Torrent trackers (but not tpb usually). Just search some books on the topic you are interested in and that's it. For example, I used to have 2 medical problems which I have successfully solved using this method. One medical problem of mine I have solved completely and what about another I can prove you there is just no cure (despite of some doctors promise me that they can do it for $$$). That was a lot of reading bu…

I've also found that the best way to avoid search spam is to ignore the web entirely and go to well-reviewed books about my topic of interest. I tend to search for books on Amazon or Abebooks, check out the reviews, and then buy them if the price is reasonable, order them at my local library, or download them from LibGen if they're hard to get or too expensive. It takes longer, but the quality of information is much higher. For example, I was learning about wine recently—the web is full of SEO-optimized junk about wine, but there are many excellent books on the topic. Snippets in Google Books are also quite useful if I don't need a full book.

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#179

Post by the_generalist »

fwungy wrote: post #139

Kagi.com is pretty good. It's like how Goofle used to work. I'm saving my free searches on it. May pay for it eventually. A curated search like the original Yahoo! would be nice. Goofle hides a lot of my preferred sources.

Goofle is a great company name

Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

#180

Post by mambru »

ekanes wrote: post #176
zelias wrote: post #9

I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for

Re: Reddit -- I'd love for YC to issue a Request For Startups around verified human identity - soon it will be hard to distinguish people from AI that posts comments, participates and then astroturfs sites like reddit. Account creation date will help as a band-aid but isn't the right solution.

You mean like worldcoin, by yc's very own Sam Altman?
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