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Internet Search Tips
- gwern 5y agoShould just link to https://www.gwern.net/Search https://www.gwern.net/Search - the URL works fine, and the IA version has various glitches like the link icons.
- traceroute66 5y agoThe IA version is also over a year out of date (2020-01-21 vs 2021-03-29)
- forgotpwd16 5y agoComparing date archived and modification, this was recently updated. Considering the various features the site has, is there a way to compare with older versions (such as is possible in a wiki)?
- gwern 5y agoNo, sorry. Ever since I blew through the Github size limits, I haven't found a good static Hakyll-compatible way to present history, especially histories with lots of tiny edits. (As I keep experimenting with new approaches, I have to do lots of mass edits to old pages to update them.)
- dang 5y agoChanged from https://web.archive.org/web/20210307110938/https://www.gwern.net/Search https://web.archive.org/web/20210307110938/https://www.gwern.... Thanks!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoI see Gwern doesn't encourage using operands in DDG. Maybe that's because DDG ignores them.
- inetsee 5y agoDDG does support some search operands. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoWe'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 frustrated and go to Google.
- sneak 5y agoGoogle does this shit too, to a slightly lesser extent.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoGoogle once became as bad as DDG is. About 3 years ago they unwound that, a fair amount. Presently, I get some G searches w/ no results - which is helpful.
- feanaro 5y agoThis 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.
- mikevin 5y agoI really dislike that kind of search because I'm forced to scan the results to see if they really contain what I'm looking for. Try searching "arm" with anything programming related term and count the articles about armchairs, it's infuriating.
- effnorwood 5y agoType in words of interest
- zeeshanqureshi 5y agoGreat set of tips. On a side note, I wish the site had a simple, easy to read fonts option similar to the switchable light/dark mode.
- _Microft 5y agoMaybe your browser's reader mode fits the bill? Firefox allows to choose serif/sans-serif fonts, font-size, line spacing and background color for example.
- zeeshanqureshi 5y agoI hesitate to admit this, because it makes me look stupid but you are right. I should remember to use the reader mode more often.
- _Microft 5y agoIt is easy to forget a tool which one rarely needs, there is nothing stupid about that in my opinion :)
- zeeshanqureshi 5y agoTrue :)
- Yizahi 5y agoWell that's obvious, but really it's a shame to force reader mode on such a beautiful site. And fonts there were selected with some purpose it seems, it's just that font hinting on Windows makes them off, they probably look good on Macintosh.
- smiley1437 5y agoGreat summary of tips Long ago I realized the the only reason I have a job is my ability to google stuff lol
- lancesells 5y agoI feel the same. Just talking the time to search and leave no stone unturned makes so many things much easier.
- the_arun 5y agoThe site is designed beautifully to distract me to look around how it has been implemented rather than the main topic - search tips. Yes, Font could have been better for readability :)
- tux 5y agoThanks for the article, this reminded me of GHDB; https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database
- hargup 5y agoThis is interesting, thanks for sharing.
- CompArtisan 5y agoQuite relevant and useful. For articles that are blocked by a paywall I usually search the article URL on www.archive.org and there's usually an unblocked one there.
- lavoiems 5y agoA neat trick that is not presented is to use https://www.connectedpapers.com/ https://www.connectedpapers.com/ The website presents a graph of related works clustered by similarities.
- domenicrosati 5y agohttps://scite.ai 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
- maddyboo 5y agoI 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 installation as simple as pasting a GitHub release URL into the SurfingKeys settings. I hope to have this done within a week or two. [0]: https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys [1]: https://github.com/b0o/surfingkeys-conf https://github.com/b0o/surfingkeys-conf [2]: https://github.com/b0o/surfingkeys-conf#screenshots https://github.com/b0o/surfingkeys-conf#screenshots
- jraby3 5y agoThis sounds similar to the !bangs in DuckDuckGo, like !yt for YouTube or !gi for google image search. It’s one of my favorite features.
- maddyboo 5y agoYeah, 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!<bang>`. I’m also looking into adding first class support for DDG instant answers.
- sneak 5y agoI 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.
- sbierwagen 5y agoTo 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?
- ergot_vacation 5y agoSome 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 of politics, "politics," DMCA madness, "right to be forgotten" etc. The image search is especially impressive. Remember when Google Images used to give you actual results when trying to find the source of an obscure image? Yandex still does, and it does a bunch of other neat things too, like automatically trying to transcribe text from an image if it's text-heavy. My instinct is that a lot of this capacity exists in Google Images, but is either mostly hidden from the user or deliberately hobbled to stop the oh so evil content pirates. Zero privacy of course. Assume the Russian government is watching in realtime as you hammer in another inane search. But for some use cases that's fine.
- userbinator 5y agoBing is also significantly less censored, especially for adult content, but also has a smaller index than Google and less operators.
- Logon90 5y agoYeah, heard that is mostly why it still exists.
- derefr 5y agoIs there a search portal that does backend-side searches of all these politically-disjoint large search providers, and then merges and deduplicates the result?
- eli 5y agoHah that was a big thing in the mid 90s. And, remarkably, this site still seems to be going strong https://www.dogpile.com/ https://www.dogpile.com/ I thought it was a really dumb name at the time, but I remembered it some 20 years later.
- jl6 5y agoFravia’s searchlores for the 21st century!
- tomcooks 5y agoWay to few Latin mottos to be even close to SL /s
- _Microft 5y agoI'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:config, you want to set accessibility.typeaheadfind to true. The timeout after which the search bar disappears again is set as number of milliseconds in accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout. The default of 5000 milliseconds might be excessive if you do not want the bar to be in the way during browsing. I'm very happy with 1500 for that which gives 1.5 seconds after the last keystroke to e.g. start editing the search string before the search bar disappears again. Edit: it looks like you can enable typeaheadfind in the preferences nowadays. Tweaking the timeout still requires going to about:config, though.
- nitrogen 5y agoI 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.
- _Microft 5y agoThe 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26743028
- userbinator 5y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- dredmorbius 5y agoYet another reason to employ DDG as your primary search engine. I've never been rate-limited by it. (Google Web Search rate limits seemed to kick in around 2015 or so.) You can still search Google (or metasearch) with bang queries, so, !S (for the Startpage Google proxy search) or !G (for google directly). Google rate-limiting / CAPTCHA is vastly worse if you're on Tor or VPN. For the most part I simply avoid Google entirely.
- grimgrin 5y agooff base question, i suppose inspired by porch sitting + reading gwern's case studies: https://www.gwern.net/Search#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 of this might exist at defcon/thotcon/similar ironically, instead of searching, im asking here haha
- jamiek88 5y agoIf idly daydreamed about this becoming a sport like esports. Huge crowds cheering as I find that obscure English ePub on a Chinese site, they roar with delight as I DDG !bang their faces off. Monster energy sponsoring the fastest ‘search parent directory’ surfers. Ahhh if only. Also while I’m at it I’d like ‘kicking stones against other stones at juuuuuust the right angle to ping against another stone while walking leashed dogs’ to become an Olympic sport.
- sellyme 5y ago> 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.
- Jedd 5y agoTo 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.
- justinnhli 5y agoAnother 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/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gesturefy/
- sellyme 5y ago> 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.
- Jedd 5y agoTotally 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.
- mcshicks 5y agoSearching 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.
- CGamesPlay 5y agoI'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."
- Alekhine 5y agoI actually like it, I just wish it wasn't so fast. The delay is less than a second when really it ought to be more like a a second and a half.
- shp0ngle 5y agoyou can disable those pop-ups. make one of them appear and click on the gear icon top right.
- gwern 5y agoLike on Wikipedia, which we borrowed the design from, popups can be controlled & disabled with the 'gear' icon. I'm not sure what you mean by "can't actually click on them". Popups are positioned away from the link and do not cover up the original link, which can be clicked on like normal. (You can also click on the obvious thing in the popup, the title, which is a hyperlink to the original.) The scroll thing is definitely bad, but fixing it is a little difficult. (GreaterWrong solves it by a hybrid of 2 listeners which tries to guess if you are mousing or scrolling instead of just on-hover.) I don't know if/when that will be fixed. In the mean time, I'm boosting the timeout since more than one person has complained about popups being too quick.
- CGamesPlay 5y ago> Popups are positioned away from the link and do not cover up the original link, which can be clicked on like normal. (You can also click on the obvious thing in the popup, the title, which is a hyperlink to the original.) This was absolutely not the case, at least on my viewport size. FWIW, I also didn't realize about clicking on "the obvious thing in the popup", possibly because this is never a thing that you click on in websites. > The scroll thing is definitely bad, but fixing it is a little difficult. What's the motivation for this being a hover effect? Seems like clicking on the link to open it is a pretty well-tested paradigm. [append] One big difference between what I saw on your site and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia's are only previews and (AFAICT) feature no internal interactions.
- Sniffnoy 5y agoGwern mentions the benefit of being affiliated with a university so you can use ILL (in particular, Illiad). I think it's worth mentioning some ways you can get ILL without having to be a student or professor. (Note that these are not actually going to be practical for most people, but for people who happen to be in the right situation to take advantage of them, they can be quite useful.) 1. Live in New York City. Yes, the New York Public Library seems to provide access to Illiad! I haven't actually tried making use of this, but it's on the website. Obviously you're not going to move to New York just to take advantage of this, but if you happen to already live there, you have this option! I expect there are other cities and non-university organizations that provide access to Illiad; I mention New York just because it's one I know of. If other people know of others, I'd be glad to know of them! 2. Get a position as a "visiting scholar" at a nearby university. :) OK, this one will likely require knowing someone there, and maybe having a PhD since there may be some minimum requirements, but generally if you can get a professor to name you can one you can become a "visiting scholar" -- this isn't a job, they don't pay you anything and you're not required to do anything for them, and as such there's no hiring process, you just can get named one if you meet the minimum requirements (they may want to see some sort of CV also). They won't pay you any money but you will get library access, including ILL! So, y'know, that's useful. :) Obviously that route isn't open to everyone either. But depending on your situation it can certainly be easier than enrolling as a student or getting a job as a professor!
- tjalfi 5y agoI'm not familiar with Illiad but King County Library System[0] in Washington state has excellent interlibrary loans. I have received books from libraries all over the US, Canada, prisons, museums, and even the Library of Congress. Another option is that some university libraries have a membership program; you can borrow books and place interlibrary loans for an annual fee. [0] https://kcls.bibliocommons.com/ https://kcls.bibliocommons.com/
- dredmorbius 5y agoAn excellent set of (re)search methods, many of which I'm well familiar. A few notes and additions: - There are numerous public-domain full-text archives, including Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and many small specialised library collections (usually focused on a given topic, e.g., Online Library of Liberty). Less useful for post-1925 materials, but often high-quality renderings (either scans or proofread re-typeset / typed-in documents) available. Google Books also allows full PDF downloads for public-domain works, generally. - NYPL's Secretly Public Domain project has been reviewing copyright renewal records to find works published since 1923, and before 1964, whose copyright was never renenwed. Other projects (Internet Archive notably) have been flagging these works as being in the public domain, and hence freed of any download restrictions. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-1923-1964 https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-19... https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/03/30/unlocking-record-american-creativity https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/03/30/unlocking-record-americ... - OpenLibrary / Internet Archive increasingly have current under-copyright books available for at least 1hr and up to 14 day loan. The reader is less elegant than it had been in past, but is viable. - HathiTrust is all but useless with its download restrictions. It's helpful to determine if records exist. - Worldcat gets only a brief mention by Gwern. It's a union catalog (a combined library catalog of a vast number of libraries worldwide), of books, articles, and other document types, and is an excellent way of determining if a book exists, what an author's output is, and/or the documents within a given search space. !worldcat DDG bang search, "ti:" is title, "au:" is author, "kw:" is keyword. Space any colons (":") occurring within search terms, or omit them entirely. You'll still have to either find the digital record elsewhere, or track down a library, but quite useful. - You can save online materials to the Internet Archive using the 'save' URL: https://web.archive.org/save/<original_url> So to save this particular HN discussion we'd specify: https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26847596 You can submit that through any HTTP client (curl, wget, lynx, w3m, your GUI browser, etc.). Requests can be trivially scripted and batched. This is ... documented somewhere (I stumbled across it myself), though I'm not finding the specifics. Related "save page now" functionality is mentioned here: https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/23/the-wayback-machines-save-page-now-is-new-and-improved/ https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/23/the-wayback-machines-sav... - Motorised paper cutters are available at some photocopy shops. Inquire as to whether or not you can have books debinded by them. (Generally anything resembling paper is fine, though the blades can be damaged by metal or other materials.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- micelwell000011 5y agohttps://www.geogebra.org/m/k8ysfasj https://www.geogebra.org/m/k8ysfasj
- micelwell000011 5y agohttps://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/resumes/564654456.pdf https://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/resumes/56465...