Not OP, but I've increasingly been searching within published papers and books for information.
Rather than rely on Internet re-tellings (sometimes reliable, sometimes not) of what's in such references, got to the source.
The availability of technical articles and books through (extralegal) services such as SciHub and LibGen means that the quality of information online has increased greatly. Not that articles and books are always valid, but they tend to have a lower bullshit level.
If you're into older sources (1924 and prior, some after), The Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, as well as other archival sites, have a wealth of information.
Google's Ngram Viewer is an amazing way to trace the emergence of specific terms (and occasionally names). I'll often start my search from Ngram Viewer, find an early period of pre-emergence of a key phrase, and look for first instances of mention. For technical papers, further drilling down to references can turn up first instances. I've used this successfully numerous times to track down idea origins (or near-origins), examples being the concepts of money as based on energy (Frederick Soddy -> H.G. Wells -> A.C. Clarke -> Kim Stanley Robinson), or the modern misapprehensions of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor (Jacob Viner -> Paul Samuelson -> FEE/Leonard Read -> Regnery Press -> von Mises/Rothbardian Libertarianism -> General popular use ~mid 1960s).
Wikipedia can be useful, though you want to rely on its references section for verification. Reddit's "Ask" subs (Science & Historians) can be useful. For programming / inforamtion technology technical info, StackExchange is pretty good.