Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internet search tips

gwern.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: Internet search tips

#61

Post by costco »

Really good list. Here are some others I've discovered:

Some libgen clone sites like z-lib have fulltext search on books with support for exact matches: https://zlibrary-asia.se/fulltext/?q=%22frank+sinatra%22&typ...

Even if you are going to purchase book on a subject, this finds so much stuff that is not in Google because of copyright delisting and is sometimes useful in knowing which books to consider.

Yandex results especially the non English ones can be good if you are willing to use a translator.

Re: Internet search tips

#62

Post by Thoeu388 »

cole-k wrote: post #22
Thoeu388 wrote: post #16

I found it useful to screenrecord all my computer activity. It is OCR searchable. This way if I vaguely remember some bits, I can reconstruct my sources. It also preserves original text, in case sources get edited.

I've thought about this or something similar (e.g. ArchiveBox). It seems like 95-99% of the content you archive will be junk that you never look at again, but that 1-4% really might be worth it. Especially if it gets taken down. What do you do for storage, though? I haven't invested in a NAS or personal storage over 1TB. I think I understand now why some of these archive utilities offer you the option to upload to th…

I buy 4TB external HDDs and use them as archival tapes.

Re: Internet search tips

#63

Post by mdp2021 »

bdn_ wrote: post #8
38 wrote: post #2

my problem is some operators just dont work any more, either on purpose or because of crappy quality control. for example, you used to be able to do: allintitle:Neil Diamond If You Go Away on YouTube, and get exactly what you would think, results with all those words in the title. but now, you dont: https://youtube.com/results?search_query=allintitle:Neil+Dia... now, I get crap like this: Neil Diamond & Shirley Basse…

Has anyone else experienced DuckDuckGo ignoring the exclusion operator? For example, searching `kiwi -fruit`, with no space between the hyphen and second word, used to bring up results that did not include the word "fruit". This no longer seems to be the case.

> duckduckgo ... exclusion operator

Removed a few weeks ago.

Somebody posted in these pages the github diff showing the removal of the options.

Re: Internet search tips

#64

Post by cma »

orphea wrote: post #31

I feel like Google became absolutely unusable as a search engine. You search for "keyword1 keyword2", and at least half of the results are either "Missing: keyword1" or "Missing: keyword2".

They moved over to really dumb word vector stuff, they mention it in the TPUv4 paper and it is pretty surprising but probably monetized better somehow.

Re: Internet search tips

#65

Post by flyinghamster »

ImaCake wrote: post #46
orphea wrote: post #31

I feel like Google became absolutely unusable as a search engine. You search for "keyword1 keyword2", and at least half of the results are either "Missing: keyword1" or "Missing: keyword2".

Until a year ago using DuckDuckGo instead of google felt like only an equal or inferior option. But at some recent point I have found that DDG has slightly improved and Google has gotten much, much worse. With DDG and Bing Chat, google's future is looking very Internet Explorer 6.

DDG is following Google's path, with removal of the exclusion operator. Nothing like searching for "foo -quux" and finding "quux" in ALL of my search results, on DDG and Google alike.

Re: Internet search tips

#66

Post by flyinghamster »

Thoeu388 wrote: post #18

For complement I would recommend Russian yandex, and vk.com (russian facebook). It is like snapshot of internet from 2018, before everything was hit by massive censorship. It has some very niche communities that are no longer on internet. For example Ancient Egypt history, western net is filled with alien theories, Russians are doing experimental archaeology. Also repair, electronics... Also Telegram is like second i…

The irony of someone recommending Russian platforms to evade "censorship" is astounding.

Re: Internet search tips

#67

Post by cole-k »

Thoeu388 wrote: post #62
cole-k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this or something similar (e.g. ArchiveBox). It seems like 95-99% of the content you archive will be junk that you never look at again, but that 1-4% really might be worth it. Especially if it gets taken down. What do you do for storage, though? I haven't invested in a NAS or personal storage over 1TB. I think I understand now why some of these archive utilities offer you the option to upload to th…

I buy 4TB external HDDs and use them as archival tapes.

How often do you need to buy a new one?

Re: Internet search tips

#68

Post by WaffleIronMaker »

andrepd wrote: post #24
Jakob wrote: post #15

+1 for his tip of "Search The Internet Archive". The other day I searched for the Tom & Jerry full episodes on the web to no avail (streaming platforms and video platforms like youtube only have rubbish cuts). The internet archive has every episode starting from the first one in 1940, in an easily accessible player without any ads or recommendations: https://archive.org/details/tom-and-jerry-all-114-episodes

Your comment just reminded me of how great the Internet Archive is, so I guess it's time to donate another 100 bucks to IA again.

Just as a quick link for others, it's possible to set up a single or monthly donation to the internet archive at this link: https://archive.org/donate/

Re: Internet search tips

#69

Post by vGPU »

Thoeu388 wrote: post #18

For complement I would recommend Russian yandex, and vk.com (russian facebook). It is like snapshot of internet from 2018, before everything was hit by massive censorship. It has some very niche communities that are no longer on internet. For example Ancient Egypt history, western net is filled with alien theories, Russians are doing experimental archaeology. Also repair, electronics... Also Telegram is like second i…

Yandex hits me with captchas every search and every 2-3 pages on Firefox.

Re: Internet search tips

#70

Post by krmblg »

There are a couple of comments on how search engine x dropped feature y on date z (i time periods after competitor j did).

Can anyone recommend a site that tracks those changes?

I find myself getting annoyed by serps of a given vendor and I might even be adopting to changes but ultimately jumping ship towards the next best thing if I can’t figure out a very low-effort way of influencing the results in my favor using flags that suddenly stop working - all I notice is a significant degradation of result quality.

Post reply on HN