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Get better at Googling

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Re: Get better at Googling

#221

Post by markdown »

docmars wrote: post #217
markdown wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest but USA elected Donald Trump to lead them, proving once and for all that misinformation spread by the internet is potentially world-ending. You jest but if a pandemic 100 times as deadly as COVID came upon us, anti-vaxxers and the misinformation they spread via the internet could potentially end the world. You either education your people, or you have to control the information they receive. The GOP has long…

I wholeheartedly disagree with just about everything you said (much of it is misinformation and/or hysterics), but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. :)

I probably was a bit hysterical there, but I think the underlying point that an uneducated populace just can't cope in the modern world centered around information on the internet.

I know someone I consider intelligent who started with one Joe Rogan video and a year later was a raving pro-Russia, pro-China, holocaust denying anti-vaxxer. Youtube took him from fun, reasonable guy who you'd love to have at a party to the bore who found a conspiracy in everything and who just oozed bile and anger at this new world that millennials had destroyed.

If he couldn't fight the propaganda, your average person on the street can't. It's a recipe for disaster, and to my mind the only short term solution is to censor the propaganda.

Of course over the long term, the only real solution is to create a smarter population who aren't just trained in arithmetic, but in logic and philosophy.

Re: Get better at Googling

#222

Post by robben1234 »

nyx_ wrote: post #166
submeta wrote: post #164

There are so many devs who can‘t properly Google, but there are equally many devs who can‘t get a couple of books about a subject (that alone is a skill not many devs have mastered), dive into it and take the time to understand. Either they never learned how to properly read or they don‘t have the patience, and thus look for a shortcut. It‘s okay if you are familiar with a tech to look up how this or that can be solv…

Yeah, absolutely. I've become so accustomed to the instant gratification loop of "how do I do this -> internet for 2 minutes -> okay got it" that having to actually read papers or docs on something to build an understanding is a real slog for me lately. I think neural plasticity goes both ways and it's a skill that can be built up again, but getting yourself weaned off of immediate answers is pretty tough.

Try to solve the problem described by the book or research using your Google skills and once you fail you'll appreciate the resource that gives more insight more. Giving yourself more context to the subject makes things interesting.

If you succeed, what's the point of reading the entire thing then? If it still has something distinct from what you already achieved go the the specific page and read that.

Re: Get better at Googling

#223

Post by dereg »

rcoveson wrote: post #219
qyi wrote: post #201

> 1. Use quotes to force an exact-match search Almost never works these days. Google now usually just quantizes your search terms into an ad or ultra popular news article written 3 minutes ago. It also ignores all your operators most of the time. Bonus: If you use something like inurl: You get blocked for a "hacking attempt". Google also has blocked Tor and VPNs since 2006 or so. In fact, they are the one big search…

I'm struck by the profundity of this loss. It's almost as bad as if something like archive.org were to just disappear. SaaS is so ephemeral. One day, you have access to a version of Google that works absurdly well. The next, it's gone forever. I used to use Google so much that it felt like a border collie in those dog competitions. I knew how it behaved, I had a bank of commands/searches that I had half-memorized and…

It's really sad. There used to be a time when I'd try to recall a specific page on the internet and I'd be able to use a zillion search operators to narrow in to the page that I was looking for. Now, that's impossible.

I've noticed search for everything kind of sucks now as every platform has tried to become curators.

Re: Get better at Googling

#224

Post by okareaman »

chucksmash wrote: post #206
okareaman wrote: post #193

My first job was writing 68000 asm for the yet to be released Macintosh. I had a list of opcodes and a register list for the chip. I had sparse, unfinished documentation of the Mac ROM. You will never hear me complain about developers using search engines to help them code.

Do you ever get nostalgic for it? Most of my programming career has been in Python/JS and as I've gotten a bit older, I've found bare metal computing a very rewarding hobby. I'm curious if - having done this to pay the bills as opposed to noodling around - you miss that era?

Not really. I like asm coding but it gets tedious on large projects and I don't miss dealing with bugs that bring the whole machine down.

Re: Get better at Googling

#226

Post by 2snakes »

loonster wrote: post #42
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #26

Google used to be better, I feel. Nowadays when you add a particular word to make the search specific (otherwise it's too general), Google decides for you, there aren't many results with that keyword, so it excludes the word and gives you a list of irrelevant things. Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes, but why doesn't it do that by default?

Google works much better when you use the information they know about you. At the office, I get much better work related searches than at home. This has the benefit of profiling my coworkers and not just me, and the searches/ sites visited are generally work related. Edit: I don't like Google's intrusiveness either. I do not use it much at home. The searches are better when you teach it with better data. Searching in…

There's an idea: you get better results based on the corporate IP you're coming from. :(

Re: Get better at Googling

#227

Post by nbardy »

markdown wrote: post #221
docmars wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly disagree with just about everything you said (much of it is misinformation and/or hysterics), but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. :)

I probably was a bit hysterical there, but I think the underlying point that an uneducated populace just can't cope in the modern world centered around information on the internet. I know someone I consider intelligent who started with one Joe Rogan video and a year later was a raving pro-Russia, pro-China, holocaust denying anti-vaxxer. Youtube took him from fun, reasonable guy who you'd love to have at a party to t…

Whatever problem your describing, the answer isn't to control people

Re: Get better at Googling

#230

Post by b215826 »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #220
b215826 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inurl: keyword is extremely useful when combined with the site: keyword, e.g., https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+inurl:progra... This would pull up results for "Vim tutorial" from the /r/programming subreddit. Of course, there are better ways to search by subreddit, but using site: and inurl: is the most website-agnostic way to narrow down results. Both these keywords also work on DuckDuckGo. I also…

You can just do site:reddit.com/r/programming :)

Of course, for Reddit that's definitely better. But there are cases where the inurl + site solution is the only possible one -- I'm a physicist and I often want to find papers from a specific journal, e.g., the Physical Review Letters. Now, I could use the search function on the journal's page, but in my experience that doesn't often give you good results. So I search PRL using the site:link.aps.org+inurl:PhysRevLett keyword, e.g.,

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:link.aps.org+inurl:Phys...

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