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Internet Search Tips

gwern.net

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Re: Internet Search Tips

#51

Post by Jedd »

To augment the suggestion around learning / using hot-keys, ctrl-shift-t (chrome) undoes the most recent tab or browser window close. It's insanely handy, but from casual observation, not well known / used.

If you have a mouse with some additional side buttons (that you don't already have mapped) I can strongly recommend mapping them to ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn, so you can go left/right with your tabs in the current browser without having to relocate either your hands or your mouse pointer. Because I tend to open many links to new tabs (middle-click) - a consequence of living in a country (Australia) with poor internet speeds - I'm now lost whenever I have to use a mouse without those buttons.

Watching people use the mouse to go to the hamburger menu to recover a just-closed-tab, or to the tab bar to switch between tabs, or moving the mouse to the scrollbar to move the content up/down, is the contemporary equivalent of watching someone play Solitaire intentionally poorly.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#52

Post by justinnhli »

Jedd wrote: post #51

To augment the suggestion around learning / using hot-keys, ctrl-shift-t (chrome) undoes the most recent tab or browser window close. It's insanely handy, but from casual observation, not well known / used. If you have a mouse with some additional side buttons (that you don't already have mapped) I can strongly recommend mapping them to ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn, so you can go left/right with your tabs in the current b…

Another option for people who don't have additional mouse buttons is to install addons for mouse gestures, such as Gesturefy [1]. You can then bind undo close tab, next/prev tab, and others to a mouse gesture, allowing you to do those actions without button hunting on the screen.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gesturefy/

Re: Internet Search Tips

#53

Post by mcshicks »

Searching internet archive for books is really great. I do prefer books to online reading, and often times I can get a book I'm interested in via inter-library loan if I am willing to wait. However if I can read the first chapter online on the internet archive I know if it's worth the wait to read the actual book. I do see it mentioned quite often on HN, but I feel like the population in general when I mention it I don't get the same response I do if I mention say Google or Wikipedia. I would not say IA is on par with those in terms of how often I use it, but it definitely offers something significant that is not offered elsewhere as far as I can tell.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#54

Post by EE84M3i »

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…

Mentioned in the article, but Yandex also does some degree of facial recognition (or at least similarity) when doing reverse image searches. It works surprisingly well.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#55

Post by sellyme »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #46
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…

"Zero privacy of course." Surely this is not suggesting that Google searches afford any privacy. ;) While it might not be the Russian government who is watching, Google searches are certainly not ephemeral nor free from analysis in real-time. Aside from "things important to Russian politics", I would guess Google on behalf of its customers, who could be anyone, including governments, is far more interested in what so…

> Surely this is not suggesting that Google searches afford any privacy. ;)

Depends on who you want privacy from.

Google's entire business model relies on them being the only company on the planet who knows as much about me (or you, or any other reader) as they do. I know that anything I do while using their services is going to be logged and analysed by machines like crazy for the rest of time, but I'm also reasonably confident that they're not going to let the interns page through this data whenever they get bored, and I'm very confident that they're going to do everything in their power to prevent my complete browser history from ending up for sale on some data breach forum.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#56

Post by sellyme »

Jedd wrote: post #51

To augment the suggestion around learning / using hot-keys, ctrl-shift-t (chrome) undoes the most recent tab or browser window close. It's insanely handy, but from casual observation, not well known / used. If you have a mouse with some additional side buttons (that you don't already have mapped) I can strongly recommend mapping them to ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn, so you can go left/right with your tabs in the current b…

> If you have a mouse with some additional side buttons (that you don't already have mapped) I can strongly recommend mapping them to ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn, so you can go left/right with your tabs in the current browser without having to relocate either your hands or your mouse pointer.

These hotkeys are functionally the same as Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab, which - at least in my idle position - don't require moving your hands any meaningful amount.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#57

Post by sellyme »

grimgrin wrote: post #44

off base question, i suppose inspired by porch sitting + reading gwern's case studies: https://www.gwern.net/Search#case-studies i think i would have found most of the examples gwern listed, maybe not as quickly. i go wild on google iteratively before jumping to another search engine but, is there a tournament or contest along the lines of 'producing some result via searches' quicker than others? im thinking a form o…

> but, is there a tournament or contest along the lines of 'producing some result via searches' quicker than others? im thinking a form of this might exist at defcon/thotcon/similar

If there is, it will definitely have deliberately horrible SEO.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#58

Post by Jedd »

sellyme wrote: post #56
Jedd wrote: post #51

To augment the suggestion around learning / using hot-keys, ctrl-shift-t (chrome) undoes the most recent tab or browser window close. It's insanely handy, but from casual observation, not well known / used. If you have a mouse with some additional side buttons (that you don't already have mapped) I can strongly recommend mapping them to ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn, so you can go left/right with your tabs in the current b…

> If you have a mouse with some additional side buttons (that you don't already have mapped) I can strongly recommend mapping them to ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn, so you can go left/right with your tabs in the current browser without having to relocate either your hands or your mouse pointer. These hotkeys are functionally the same as Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab, which - at least in my idle position - don't require movin…

Totally agree - if your hands are on the keyboard, then use the keyboard shortcuts, no movement required.

If your hand is on your mouse, though, this means you don't have to move that hand back. (I'm assuming left-hand mouse uses won't find anything involving TAB to be hand-agnostic. : )

My usage pattern tends to be keyboard - search, tune search - then mouse - open lots of new tabs, then scroll up / down with mouse, and flick between those new tabs with the mouse, perhaps select some text with the mouse.

I think everyone agrees that frequent relocation between mouse / keyboard is sub-optimal.

Re: Internet Search Tips

#59

Post by CGamesPlay »

I've seen two links to this domain in as many days and I absolutely can't stand the developer's treatment of links. I can't actually click on them, because just hovering them opens them in some ephemeral pseudo-popup, and I can't read the main article, because scrolling will invariably hover over some link which will then open that popup and cover up the article I was reading.

It's absurd to me that this apparently independent blogger's website is the best argument I've ever seen for "JavaScript should be disabled by default."

Re: Internet Search Tips

#60

Post by the_arun »

Black101 wrote: post #43
the_arun wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Brave browser reader mode is not enabled if shield is enabled for the site. So I had to disable shield to see reader mode. Not intuitive, but there is work around.

What is their reasoning for blocking reader mode by default?

I think reader mode needs scripts to run. With shield enabled, looks like it is blocking reader mode script
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