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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?

#191

Post by lattrommi »

i've been using https://presearch.com/ for a little over a year roughly. it's a search aggregate, which pulls from a custom list of search engines. you can set it up to include or exclude engines from their list of about 100 large sites or add your own.

when i do a search, i scan the initial results page and if nothing pops out immediately, i click an icon for a more specific search on the appropriate engine, like wikipedia, reddit, stack exchange, etc.

there's some kind of cryptocurrency reward thing too but i couldn't care less about it and it seems a bit scammy but all crypto seems like a scam to me.

there's usually an ad or two for the first result. it's clearly marked as such. annoying but i've been trained to ignore the first couple results by google already so they are basically invisible to me.

i'm sure this sounds like i'm shilling for them, so i'll add that i do not work for them. i do not work for anyone right now. have a nice day.

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

#192

Post by sgtnoodle »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #182
sgtnoodle wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the ability for an app to register itself as the handler for links matching a pattern. So, when you click a link to a reddit thread from a search result, it opens in the reddit app rather than the default browser.

Is it possible to do that with Chrome/Chromium on a Linux desktop? I would like to reroute certain URL to different browsers.

Not that I am familiar with. You could try an extension like this one, though I haven't tried it myself. It looks like you would click the link, then click the toolbar button. https://add0n.com/open-in.html

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

#194

Post by muzani »

alangibson wrote: post #50
nerddadnear40 wrote: post #23

Welp, time to short Google in the long run. For whatever topic I'm interested in, I'll search reddit to find where the hardcore fanbase is. For example, if I'm interested in flashlights, that would be candlepower forums. The echo chambers have grown to substantial epicenters now. Give me a search engine that finds those and puts search in it and I'd pay $5 a month for that because at that point, you've found the expe…

If there's one thing I'm 100% sure of, it's that letting your in products go to crap does not necessarily decrease your stock price. With a commanding position you can extract rents up until you get disrupted put of business. And with good enough lawyers and lobbyists you can avoid disruption indefinitely.

It takes a long time though. Meta is a great example. People pointed to stock price as proof that whatever they were doing works.

But after a while, they realized that Facebook is screwed and pivoted away from the branding of Facebook. The Meta announcement was merely confirmation that they had indeed gone to crap, and that's what made shares plummet.

It's also why I'm not a major supporter of data-driven decisionmaking because the data used to make decisions can come in too late. A common mistake is to annoy users with things that make money, and then observe that money is coming in. But at some point, users leave en masse because they're just sick of how things are. By the time you get the data, the cash cow is terminally ill.

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

#195

Post by TheRealPomax »

mech422 wrote: post #94
TheRealPomax wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having decent google fu never stopped being important, you can still find what you're looking for just fine most of the time if you know how to ask google to find that for you.

'Google fu' is a myth - it's just to make us feel good. Google ignores pretty much +"anything" it wants to. (thank god it doesn't igore site: yet) What would be awesome is to have a REAL _search_ engine back, like Alta Vista - with a proper search language, and not some NLP that tries to guess what I want. Imagine being able to search a database with only keywords, vs SQL queries - thats pretty much the difference be…

google fu is not about + or -, it's about knowing what terms to include and what terms to omit, including sometimes not including the actual thing itself.

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

#196

Post by mech422 »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #195
mech422 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Google fu' is a myth - it's just to make us feel good. Google ignores pretty much +"anything" it wants to. (thank god it doesn't igore site: yet) What would be awesome is to have a REAL _search_ engine back, like Alta Vista - with a proper search language, and not some NLP that tries to guess what I want. Imagine being able to search a database with only keywords, vs SQL queries - thats pretty much the difference be…

google fu is not about + or -, it's about knowing what terms to include and what terms to omit, including sometimes not including the actual thing itself.

Again, its keyword matching vs having a real query language. Alta Vista let you do things like "john near smith" and it would match "smith, john", "john, smith", etc.

But it would NOT match "John had a very long conversation with smith about the problem"

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

#197

Post by mech422 »

valdiorn wrote: post #172
mech422 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keyword matching (when google actually honors the keywords) is hardly 'fu' ...

Just look at the bad results we get from recruiters that keyword match resumes :-D

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

#198

Post by mech422 »

ornornor wrote: post #168
mech422 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many people actually use/prefer old.reddit.com ? Seems like everyone I know uses it ... Even the ones with reddit accounts.

In our tech bubble, yes. Go to /r/popular to get a sense of the average Reddit user, they don’t use old.

Is reddit's interface really better if you login?

I've never bothered creating an account...

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

#199

Post by mech422 »

ornornor wrote: post #167
mech422 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

site:old.reddit.com FTW! :-D edit: its a joke..it would save me manually changing the url, cuz I'm too lazy to install the plugin to auto-change it for me.

On PC there are extensions to automatically rewrite Reddit.com to old.Reddit.com if you didn’t know, saves a lot of time and aggravation.

yeah - too lazy/paranoid to deal with it. Luckily, reddit is a pretty small part of my search stuff.

tbh, I think github is becoming one of my favorite 'search engines' / discovery sites. So much cool stuff buried in there ...

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

#200

Post by ornornor »

mech422 wrote: post #198
ornornor wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our tech bubble, yes. Go to /r/popular to get a sense of the average Reddit user, they don’t use old.

Is reddit's interface really better if you login? I've never bothered creating an account...

No, the redesign is awful no matter what.

old.Reddit.com works whether you’re logged in or not.

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