I use DuckDuckGo 99% of the time, and the 1% I still need Google for, it's 50/50 if I'll find anything useful that I couldn't with DDG. Also Google's search UX these days is a dumpster fire.
Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
81–90 of 216 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#82I 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
Yeah, I’m horrified but it’s wound up being the only way to find quality amateur writing about dog breeds. Most websites in that subject matter seem to be semi algorithmic content farms that echo the same uncited information.
Not to mention, most of those websites are loaded up to the hilt on a bunch of annoying adware. You can read 2-3 sentences, then you hit ad add you have to scroll past to read another 2-3 sentences to hit yet another ad you have to scroll past.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#83I continue using https://startpage.com without any issues.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#84I've been using Brave Search as my default the past ~6 months (previously I was using DuckDuckGo). I think Google is better at the "instant answer" part and its index really shines in some types of searches. Nobody talks much about it anymore but Google Books is amazing, no other search engine has that massive library at its disposal and for really specific topics, a result from an obscure old book is exactly what you need. But that said, I prefer Brave's layout and the quality of the first 2 pages is better for most everyday queries and programming questions. Brave's "Discussions" card is great: it presents threads from forums and Reddit, which gets me to an actually useful thread much faster than opening a bunch of tabs from a Google site search. There is also an interesting feature called "Goggles" for boosting or removing a specific list of domains, for example a list of sites popular on HN. It sounds like a cool idea but to be honest I never use it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#85One thing I've noticed is that it seems certain results (bandcamp as an example) strongly prefer a certain word order in the search term. For instance, I can search artist album and not get any bandcamp results but they do appear if I search album artist. So, sometimes just changing word order in your query can make a significant difference
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#86Search is losing the arms race. I think we'll need to revert back to the model of manually curated and moderated listings, a human-approved island, surrounded by an endless sea of autogen noise.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#87I have my own SearXNG instance, customized exactly with the search engines and the categories that I want.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#88I usually read Rahter Labs' blog: https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog
(specially if you like Blockchain technology)
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#89Well, I'm using brave and for dev questions I use shebangs to reddit, SO, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?
#90Work stuff: I still just run queries on Google. If I know it's a stackexchange site I'll just go directly to the site in question. Other [everyday] stuff: It depends. Sometimes I Google it, sometimes I do Google / Reddit search. In short, Google ain't that broken for me. Sure, I hate that the top results are usually ads but it's not that bad to motivate me to change. I'm just not logged on to Google when I search for…
> And no, I have no weird searches that I need to hide. I'm a normie. I'm guessing this is mostly in jest but I doubt most people, even privacy conscious people, really search anything that interesting, it's more about the idea of being able to build a long-term profile of someone based on search history. And anyway, the less "normie" you are, the more shameless you are, I'd argue. Heck, there's a lot of reasons to t…
Yeah all fair points.
Being advertised to sucks.