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Internet Search Tips

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Re: Internet Search Tips

#31

Post by nitrogen »

_Microft wrote: post #30

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:confi…

I believe that you can trigger this with the forward-slash key, and close the bar with Enter, if you prefer not to have every keypress trigger a search.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#33

Post by feanaro »

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.

This is painful to read. Instead of DDG noticing how much Google sucks at respecting operators and beating them at it, scoring praise from power users, they somehow managed to be even worse than Google.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#34

Post by sbierwagen »

sneak wrote: post #19

I miss the days when Google was AND search always and by default. Now they're terrified of not returning any results. Even when there aren't any results, they return a page full of ads that looks like results - at some point in the last dozen years, the empty "no results found" google page bit the dust.

To be fair, 20 years ago Google was used by an educated minority, and now it's the default interface to all human knowledge by every person in the world. It's a completely different product now, with a very different, and vastly larger, customer base.

As noted by many other people, Google's complete dominance of all web search for a decade makes the lack of any attempts of competition notable by their absence. If VCs are profit-maximizing, we should be seeing a new Cuil like, every month. Search advertising is a huge market, and is super profitable! Why isn't anyone trying to capture some of it? If Google is so bad now compared to some imagined heyday, then why is Bing also bad, despite the money Microsoft has spent on it?

Re: Internet Search Tips

#35

Post by _Microft »

nitrogen wrote: post #31
_Microft wrote: post #30

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:confi…

I believe that you can trigger this with the forward-slash key, and close the bar with Enter, if you prefer not to have every keypress trigger a search.

The only time that it is inconvenient to have it enabled all the time is when a page wants to react to some keys in which case I need to manually disable it. I do not like to have to press a key to start searching during normal web browsing as "/" requires either two keys or reaching for the number pad in my keyboard layout, making it no better than Ctrl+F in my opinion (something, something, "Falsehoods programmers believe about keyboard layouts/shortcuts"? ;) See also [0]). It is simply a personal preference, I guess.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26743028

Re: Internet Search Tips

#36

Post by domenicrosati »

lavoiems wrote: post #15

A neat trick that is not presented is to use https://www.connectedpapers.com/ The website presents a graph of related works clustered by similarities.

https://scite.ai does this as well (also citations are classified and analyzed whether they provide supporting or contrasting arguments to the citations)

The scite extension also works with connected papers so you can see that info there as well.

Disclaimer: I work on scite

Re: Internet Search Tips

#37

Post by maddyboo »

jraby3 wrote: post #29
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.

Yeah, it’s essentially the same concept, but with suggestions shown immediately for the context you’re searching in. For example when searching Wikipedia you’ll get snippets of articles and thumbnail images. You can even access DDG bangs using `aD!`. I’m also looking into adding first class support for DDG instant answers.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#38

Post by userbinator »

Unfortunately, using the advanced search operators "too much" can get you banned from Google for a few hours, where you get an infinite series of CAPTCHAs. What counts as too much seems to vary widely, but I've triggered it with as few as one query for some obscure phrase using site: .

Google is definitely far worse for obscure things than it was a few years or a decade ago. 2010 is roughly when I started noticing it.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#39

Post by userbinator »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #22

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…

Bing is also significantly less censored, especially for adult content, but also has a smaller index than Google and less operators.
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