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Internet search tips

gwern.net

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Re: Internet search tips

#71

Post by gwern »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #58
RGBCube wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His website is the best designed website I have genuinely ever visited, so fast, easy to navigate and very little blank space which makes it information dense. I also love the inline link opening, I definitely will be implementing that when I make my own website in the future.

>His website is the best designed website The forced R and L margins suck for people with oldster eyes who have to increase the text size. Kids these days!

I don't really understand your comment. The size of the margins doesn't really have anything to do with the size of the text. (If we increased the base font size, as we've done a few times already, the margins would probably be kept the same.) If you increase the text size with the standard browser zoom commands like Ctrl-+/-, the margins are not fixed or anything like that, and you will get bigger text & lines.

Re: Internet search tips

#72

Post by gwern »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #28

Who remembers +fravia's searchlores.org https://web.archive.org/web/20000620171446if_/http://www.sea...

I do! RIP. But even while fravia was alive, his search tips were largely outdated, and that left a gap which needed to be filled. No one else had written up a search guide for the modern Internet which touched on even a tenth of what I routinely used in my own writing to find PDFs or repair dead links, so...

Re: Internet search tips

#73

Post by wintermutestwin »

gwern wrote: post #71
wintermutestwin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>His website is the best designed website The forced R and L margins suck for people with oldster eyes who have to increase the text size. Kids these days!

I don't really understand your comment. The size of the margins doesn't really have anything to do with the size of the text. (If we increased the base font size, as we've done a few times already, the margins would probably be kept the same.) If you increase the text size with the standard browser zoom commands like Ctrl-+/-, the margins are not fixed or anything like that, and you will get bigger text & lines.

Yes, with Ctrl+ I get bigger text, but the margins stay the same and make the text flow further down the page so I have to scroll too often to read in a fluid manner. Compare to HN margins, which are smaller and when you enlarge beyond a certain point, the margins get even smaller.

Re: Internet search tips

#74

Post by gwern »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #73
gwern wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your comment. The size of the margins doesn't really have anything to do with the size of the text. (If we increased the base font size, as we've done a few times already, the margins would probably be kept the same.) If you increase the text size with the standard browser zoom commands like Ctrl-+/-, the margins are not fixed or anything like that, and you will get bigger text & lines.

Yes, with Ctrl+ I get bigger text, but the margins stay the same and make the text flow further down the page so I have to scroll too often to read in a fluid manner. Compare to HN margins, which are smaller and when you enlarge beyond a certain point, the margins get even smaller.

That's odd, because that's not how browser zoom works. I checked in both Firefox & Chromium, and if you zoom in, the margins do get smaller & smaller and eventually go away completely when you reach mobile-mode where the text is edge to edge. (Are you sure you didn't do something like enable "Zoom text only" in your browser settings? That it works 'properly' on HN doesn't mean much because HN uses weird table layout for everything.)

Re: Internet search tips

#75

Post by wintermutestwin »

gwern wrote: post #74
wintermutestwin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, with Ctrl+ I get bigger text, but the margins stay the same and make the text flow further down the page so I have to scroll too often to read in a fluid manner. Compare to HN margins, which are smaller and when you enlarge beyond a certain point, the margins get even smaller.

That's odd, because that's not how browser zoom works. I checked in both Firefox & Chromium, and if you zoom in, the margins do get smaller & smaller and eventually go away completely when you reach mobile-mode where the text is edge to edge. (Are you sure you didn't do something like enable "Zoom text only" in your browser settings? That it works 'properly' on HN doesn't mean much because HN uses weird table layout…

"Zoom text only" was enabled. I checked a freshly installed Firefox and that is not the default so I am unsure how it was enabled, but it was. Thank you so much for helping me solve this!

Re: Internet search tips

#76

Post by [deleted] »

marttt wrote: post #45
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #28

Who remembers +fravia's searchlores.org https://web.archive.org/web/20000620171446if_/http://www.sea...

a mirror without archive.org: http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm Thanks very much for this; I'm very much interested in searching techniques, but wasn't aware of this site.

[deleted]

Re: Internet search tips

#77

Post by vGPU »

mxmlnkn wrote: post #33
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…

Telegram? How so? I'm still only using it for chatting. How would you even find anything on Telegram? The simple global search? I wouldn't like to join random shady groups found through there.

The search sucks, but you can find quite a lot of interesting stuff if you have a jumping off point by checking out the groups they forward from. I’ve discovered a few great groups like that.

Most of the stuff that comes up on search is spam or garbage though, agreed. I’ve found the majority of news groups I follow through twitter.

Re: Internet search tips

#78

Post by vGPU »

jo_beef wrote: post #32
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…

> Also Telegram is like second internet, nobody talks about! Do you have any groups/channels that you can recommend?

For news?

https://t.me/CIG_telegram

https://t.me/BellumActaNews

Both provide decent coverage of global happenings.

Re: Internet search tips

#79

Post by ghghgfdfgh »

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

Internet Archive is generally invaluable for finding older media. I personally use it to find movies from the 40’s and earlier. There’s always a dozen different uploads of the movie regardless of whether it’s still under copyright protection. I guess the rights owners don’t care that much, but it could potentially be ammo to take the whole Archive down.

Re: Internet search tips

#80

Post by dev_hugepages »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #50
bdn_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone needs to build a meta search engine…

searx/searxng?
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