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Internet Search Tips

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Re: Internet Search Tips

#21

Post by mikevin »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #14
inetsee wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG does support some search operands. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...

We're both correct. They support and ignore operands. "cats and dogs": Results for exact term "cats and dogs". If no results are found, we'll try to show related results. The entire point of using quotes (or + back in the day) is to limit the results to the search term. Fluffling up the results with stuff we aren't asking for forces us to consider and disregard each one of those unasked-for results - until we get fru…

I really dislike that kind of search because I'm forced to scan the results to see if they really contain what I'm looking for. Try searching "arm" with anything programming related term and count the articles about armchairs, it's infuriating.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#22

Post by ergot_vacation »

Some neat stuff here. Only VERY briefly mentioned (so briefly I missed it at first) however: Substituting Yandex for Google is great for many use cases. Being Russian, Yandex is no doubt heavily censored, but only for things important to Russian politics. Ironically, this means that for non-Russian users, it's considerably LESS censored than Google, which has SEVERELY crippled its search in recent years in the name of politics, "politics," DMCA madness, "right to be forgotten" etc.

The image search is especially impressive. Remember when Google Images used to give you actual results when trying to find the source of an obscure image? Yandex still does, and it does a bunch of other neat things too, like automatically trying to transcribe text from an image if it's text-heavy. My instinct is that a lot of this capacity exists in Google Images, but is either mostly hidden from the user or deliberately hobbled to stop the oh so evil content pirates.

Zero privacy of course. Assume the Russian government is watching in realtime as you hammer in another inane search. But for some use cases that's fine.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#24

Post by _Microft »

zeeshanqureshi wrote: post #18
_Microft wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your browser's reader mode fits the bill? Firefox allows to choose serif/sans-serif fonts, font-size, line spacing and background color for example.

I hesitate to admit this, because it makes me look stupid but you are right. I should remember to use the reader mode more often.

It is easy to forget a tool which one rarely needs, there is nothing stupid about that in my opinion :)

Re: Internet Search Tips

#25

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

sneak wrote: post #20
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're both correct. They support and ignore operands. "cats and dogs": Results for exact term "cats and dogs". If no results are found, we'll try to show related results. The entire point of using quotes (or + back in the day) is to limit the results to the search term. Fluffling up the results with stuff we aren't asking for forces us to consider and disregard each one of those unasked-for results - until we get fru…

Google does this shit too, to a slightly lesser extent.

Google once became as bad as DDG is. About 3 years ago they unwound that, a fair amount. Presently, I get some G searches w/ no results - which is helpful.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#26

Post by zeeshanqureshi »

_Microft wrote: post #24
zeeshanqureshi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hesitate to admit this, because it makes me look stupid but you are right. I should remember to use the reader mode more often.

It is easy to forget a tool which one rarely needs, there is nothing stupid about that in my opinion :)

True :)

Re: Internet Search Tips

#27

Post by Black101 »

the_arun wrote: post #11

The site is designed beautifully to distract me to look around how it has been implemented rather than the main topic - search tips. Yes, Font could have been better for readability :)

Push the reader button in the address bar?

Re: Internet Search Tips

#29

Post by jraby3 »

maddyboo wrote: post #17

I want to add a suggestion to the hotkey shortcuts section: I use the Chrome/Firefox addon SurfingKeys [0] with my own configuration [1] in which I’ve added search engine auto-suggestions for just over 50 sites. So, for example, to start searching Google Scholar I type `ags`, or to search GitHub I type `agh`. Check out the screenshots [2] to see what I mean. I’m currently working on cleaning up the code and making in…

This sounds similar to the !bangs in DuckDuckGo, like !yt for YouTube or !gi for google image search. It’s one of my favorite features.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#30

Post by _Microft »

I'm unsure about other browsers but Firefox has "find as you type" functionality built. It allows to search the current webpage by simply starting to type. If the typed text matches a link, one can press enter to follow it. This feature makes navigating and searching the current page a breeze and can greatly speed up your web browsing in general.

Here are settings related to the feature:

To enable it from about:config, you want to set accessibility.typeaheadfind to true. The timeout after which the search bar disappears again is set as number of milliseconds in accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout. The default of 5000 milliseconds might be excessive if you do not want the bar to be in the way during browsing. I'm very happy with 1500 for that which gives 1.5 seconds after the last keystroke to e.g. start editing the search string before the search bar disappears again.

Edit: it looks like you can enable typeaheadfind in the preferences nowadays. Tweaking the timeout still requires going to about:config, though.

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