11 ms·

Ask HN: How do you find stuff on the internet now?

142 points by nicbou 4y ago

I'm getting tired of repeating every Google search with quotes around each word. What search engine do you clever hackers use these days, and why?

alangibson 4y ago
I'm almost always looking for technical stuff, so I go right to the source. StackOverflow, Reddit, arxiv. Best of all is still hyper-specific dedicated forums where they exist. For shopping I use Geizhals, Idealo or huge sellers like Digikey.
cpach 4y ago
Reddit search. HN search. Yandex. https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ (and Google)
raybb 4y ago
What kind of things are you looking for? I've been using Kagi (a paid search engine with a free tier) and quite like it but tbh it is only marginally better than google at the moment. I've also been trying to ask questions on forums more when I can't find answers (or blog myself) that way people in the future can find the.
- smt88 4y ago
  Kagi used to be fine. It gets its results from Google, though, and recently it became much worse than Google. I'm back to Google and having a rage aneurysm every time it refuses to respect my quotes (which is always). NLP is the worst thing that ever happened to search, other than SEO and content farms of course.
  - mech422 4y ago
    >> LP is the worst thing that ever happened to search, other than SEO and content farms I just wish someone would bring back alta vista with a larger crawl index (or even just a 'specialized' crawl index for tech stuff). The search language was awesome for geeks. Trying to make search engines more appealing to 'casual users' has basically left 'power users' high and dry.
  - tome 4y ago
    Interesting. I'm still finding Kagi as good as it was when I started subscribing (perhaps a year ago). I wonder what happened.
danwee 4y ago
yandex.com I usually search for books, movies and mp3s. With Google is kinda hard (or impossible) to do the same.
- laserdancepony 4y ago
  That‘s Russian IIRC, is it safe to use?
  - throw_away1525 4y ago
    Even if Putin himself could read your searches, would you care? I guess don't use Yandex if you're a Ukrainian soldier but otherwise what are you worried about?
    - kerpotgh 4y ago
      Yes, there’s no telling how states like Russia secure that information, disseminate it to other paying customers, leak info about high value citizens to use as kompromat etc.
      - ornornor 4y ago
        That’s a double standard because you could swap yandex and Russia with google and US and also have a very plausible scenario of what’s happening right now.
  - danwee 4y ago
    What do you mean by "safe"? It's a search engine, it just returns you search results. If you are worried about JS/tracking... well, Google and others are already tracking you. I use Apple devices, so Apple knows everything about me as well. If you are worried about the links you may click when yandex returns you search results, there is nothing special about yandex, same rules apply as in the wild wild web: double check what you download (e.g., do not double click "rihanna-song1.mp3.exe" on Windows!)
    - 4y ago
actually_a_dog 4y ago
In general, I let a lot of stuff find me via aggregators like Reddit and HN. If I’m searching for specific things, I’ll often go to a specialized site like Stack Overflow. But if I don’t know exactly what I’m after, then it’s the “search Google, put a couple key terms in quotes, repeat” dance.
- stef25 4y ago
  G doesn't really cut it anymore for me. Anything related to cooking, traveling, health ... nothing but crap.
Nicksil 4y ago
Duck it https://duck.com https://duck.com
- focusedone 4y ago
  Duck has come a long way and is seriously useful now. The Bangs are fantastic time savers too. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
  - folkrav 4y ago
    I do enjoy DDG, but I also still seem to have to use the !g bang to fall back to a Google search more often than I'd like to.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      This. As much as I like the idea of DDG, any time I try to use it again I end up having to add !g more than half the time.
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      I was like that a few years ago when I started using it. With time I realised that my query was just not returning the expected results in DDG so I'd just add the !g as a reflex. That rarely helped though but I kept doing it for a while until I lost the habit. Now I just try different queries in DDG and it may not be miles better than Google but it's definitely not worse. As always, YMMV.
  - jlmorton 4y ago
    How are the bangs time savers? They drop you into the search interface of whatever site you're searching, which is fairly universally bad. If I try a search like "Django connection pooling !r," I'm dropped into Reddit's search interface, and the top result is "My pool has water while not being conected to my water system" from /r/RimWorld. This is not useful in the least.
    - 4y ago
throw_away1525 4y ago
I'm still just appending `reddit` to my Google searches to try to find results written by human beings, although I am not optimistic that this technique will work for much longer (or perhaps even 100% of the time now).
- rationalist 4y ago
  The vast majority of it may still be written by humans, but they may not all be impartial humans; companies pretend to be end users and shill their products via reddit comments.
zelias 4y ago
I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for
- borplk 4y ago
  Google used to have a "forums" search type option which brought up some great results from forums. The "reddit" trick seems similar to that.
- rdudek 4y ago
  I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam. Most of the time, the advice is legit.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam How exactly you do this? People sell their "organically grown" reddit accounts all the time, so they look like normal users, while just a specific post is the ad itself, then the account is dumped after that.
    - Serenacula 4y ago
      You can sell your Reddit account? Where and for how much?
      - capableweb 4y ago
        PlayerUp.com, Signals.sh, EpicNPC.com, the number of sites you can sell your social media account is endless. Don't expect to get too much from it though.
- dzek69 4y ago
  it doesn't work for me. The only threads I can find on reddit are those that are dead and unanswered :(
thedriver 4y ago
I'm not sure if it's that much better, but I've been thinking about moving to some "non big tech" search engine such as https://gigablast.com https://gigablast.com
racl101 4y ago
Work stuff: I still just run queries on Google. If I know it's a stackexchange site I'll just go directly to the site in question. Other [everyday] stuff: It depends. Sometimes I Google it, sometimes I do Google / Reddit search. In short, Google ain't that broken for me. Sure, I hate that the top results are usually ads but it's not that bad to motivate me to change. I'm just not logged on to Google when I search for stuff. And no, I have no weird searches that I need to hide. I'm a normie.
- jchw 4y ago
  > And no, I have no weird searches that I need to hide. I'm a normie. I'm guessing this is mostly in jest but I doubt most people, even privacy conscious people, really search anything that interesting, it's more about the idea of being able to build a long-term profile of someone based on search history. And anyway, the less "normie" you are, the more shameless you are, I'd argue. Heck, there's a lot of reasons to temporarily want some degree of privacy or at least a little isolation. If I was going to search about a medical issue, I'd at least use private browsing, because I don't want advertisements about it to flood me.
  - racl101 4y ago
    Yeah all fair points. Being advertised to sucks.
satoqz 4y ago
I've been selfhosting SearXNG [0] for a few months and cannot complain. It's a meta search engine, i.e. collects results from a variety of underlying search engines including Google (if enabled). The main selling points for me are: - No ads - Improved Privacy - Open Source - Customisability (Plugins, Search Engines) I'm quite content with the search results even though they're not quite on par with the quality that Google used to have. [0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng
- pkulak 4y ago
  I tried that for a while but it's so slow. Couldn't take it and finally broke down and started paying for Kagi.
- seanw444 4y ago
  +1. I was about to suggest this in my own comment. SearX/SearXNG can also improve anonymity if you use a public instance, too. I choose to selfhost however, as the ultimate customization and ownership of the instance is more important to me than anonymity. I find very interesting "indie" webpages frequently alongside my normal searches with Wiby results enabled. Wiby is actually fantastic. In response to the sibling commenter mentioning its slowness: it takes some getting used to, but honestly waiting a couple seconds versus half a second for results isn't a big deal with the wealth of relevant information it gives. With about a half dozen engines enabled, I'm getting like 3-4 second response times, and that's on DigitalOcean's second lowest-tier VPS.
- drewbitt 4y ago
  DuckDuckGo keeps banning me for using it via SearXNG. I’m the only user on my host
nerddadnear40 4y ago
Welp, time to short Google in the long run. For whatever topic I'm interested in, I'll search reddit to find where the hardcore fanbase is. For example, if I'm interested in flashlights, that would be candlepower forums. The echo chambers have grown to substantial epicenters now. Give me a search engine that finds those and puts search in it and I'd pay $5 a month for that because at that point, you've found the expert and active community and looking at cutting edge knowledge bases. I suppose it's what the academic and scientific communities used to be before subsidies and blue church ruined it.
- alangibson 4y ago
  If there's one thing I'm 100% sure of, it's that letting your in products go to crap does not necessarily decrease your stock price. With a commanding position you can extract rents up until you get disrupted put of business. And with good enough lawyers and lobbyists you can avoid disruption indefinitely.
  - muzani 4y ago
    It takes a long time though. Meta is a great example. People pointed to stock price as proof that whatever they were doing works. But after a while, they realized that Facebook is screwed and pivoted away from the branding of Facebook. The Meta announcement was merely confirmation that they had indeed gone to crap, and that's what made shares plummet. It's also why I'm not a major supporter of data-driven decisionmaking because the data used to make decisions can come in too late. A common mistake is to annoy users with things that make money, and then observe that money is coming in. But at some point, users leave en masse because they're just sick of how things are. By the time you get the data, the cash cow is terminally ill.
- AmericanOP 4y ago
  Google is a better search engine of Reddit than Reddit. Especially the app search which is a bloody mess.
  - YourDadVPN 4y ago
xnx 4y ago
Google. It's fantastic. Gets me the information I'm looking for in 1-2 queries, tops. Often the answer is right on the result page without even needing to click into a bunch of crappy sites.
- rfrey 4y ago
  Your search needs must be somewhat niche. Are you doing PhD research on content farms?
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    Having decent google fu never stopped being important, you can still find what you're looking for just fine most of the time if you know how to ask google to find that for you.
    - throw_away1525 4y ago
      So what does your 2023 google fu look like?
      - TheRealPomax 4y ago
        I have no idea how to answer that, because it depends on what I'm looking for, and involves making sure I have the terms that go with the subject I'm looking for.
        anyfoo 4y ago
        That approach used to work well for the past ~20 years or so on Google, and effectively stopped working recent-ish.
        valdiorn 4y ago
        That IS google-fu :)
    - mech422 4y ago
dzek69 4y ago
Google. Only searchpage.com is close to Google for actually returning me something I look for, but I'm just used to Google so I continue to use it. Ads are hidden for me, so I just get the results and usually when I cannot find something it's just because it doesn't exist.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
To be honest, I usually don't.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Google has now become what search engines were like before Google came. I remember putting plus signs and quotes to get a query to return even a modicum of descent results.
jasonlotito 4y ago
DuckDuckGo.
- revskill 4y ago
  duckgo.com is shorter
  - LanternLight83 4y ago
    Apparently duck.com works
    - jasonlotito 4y ago
      You can set a Default Search Engine in Firefox, and search from your browser without having to go to any URL first.
    - jonathantf2 4y ago
      I still use ddg.gg
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    Nothing is shorter. Firefox let's you setup a default search engine. You can enter your search term from your location bar.
karaterobot 4y ago
For general searches, I use Kagi, even though it's not actually better than Google. The main advantage it has over Google is that (for now at least) it isn't Google. For anything even vaguely related to a product I could pay money for, I abandon all search engines and use reddit. For any topical search, I just go to Wikipedia, or use !w.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  I also use Kagi, via $10/month subscription. Kagi seems to NOT insert sponsored / ad results, unlike Google. I therefore find its signal/noise ratio favorable.
jacooper 4y ago
Brave search is nice. Also bing AI should drop today.
graeme 4y ago
Google or Reddit, depends what I’m looking for. Google does still work for a lot of stuff For the kind of stuff where adding Reddit works, one issue is no one writes blogs anymore. I also append for a lot of things. Like say I am checking a hotel I’ll add review and find sites which wrote reviews and aren’t just aggregators
eimrine 4y ago
Torrent trackers (but not tpb usually). Just search some books on the topic you are interested in and that's it. For example, I used to have 2 medical problems which I have successfully solved using this method. One medical problem of mine I have solved completely and what about another I can prove you there is just no cure (despite of some doctors promise me that they can do it for $$$). That was a lot of reading but no other search engine on Earth can really search any medical stuff and no forums allow to discuss medical problems without a stupid censorship kind of "somebody might hurt yourself if he found this discussion by some wrong reason so we ain't allow you to discuss your medical stuff here".
- Asraelite 4y ago
  Do you mean public or private trackers?
  - eimrine 4y ago
    rutracker.org with my ability to read Russian as my mother language did as much for my education as rest of the Internets. But you may meet some English content there as well, or not language-depended content like music.
- suddenclarity 4y ago
  Maybe Facebook? I believe there are a ton of semiprivate support groups for different health conditions. But I guess one might need a starting point to be able to find a relevant one since they are specialized.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    I am not among the "dumb fucks" to use this service.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    Heh I’ve found that the overlap between “medical” anything and charlatans/mysticists/anti-vaxxers is pretty high on Facebook. This may or may not be a feature, depending on the individual.
kjkjadksj 4y ago
On the other hand, theres now plenty of terms where I think, “theres no way I will get specific results with something so vague” and just resign to living in ignorance.
user3939382 4y ago
Kagi. DDG/Bing are ridiculous with ignoring your search terms, even with quotes. I had enough. Google often has a whole page or almost a whole page of clever-widgets before any actual results, not to mention my ethical objections to their behavior and the SEO spam. Kagi works great, I like the fact that I'm paying for it and my interests are primary in the relationship.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  Same. I basically gave it a try, and stayed with it. I sometimes feel I should make more use of the advanced features, like lenses, but I'm pretty happy with just regular searches, too. Reminds me a lot of how Google used to be.
- roughly 4y ago
  Kagi’s been fantastic. I started using them out on principle, but it’s a legitimately good search engine. I almost never find myself going back to google, and when I do, Google’s usually not finding anything either.
- noisycarlos 4y ago
  Same! It's been great so far. I sure don't miss all the sponsored results at the top!
- quectophoton 4y ago
  The only thing keeping me away from Kagi is that they are US-based. Having some presence in the EU would contribute to peace of mind that your personal data is more or less under jurisdiction of the GDPR, and that there's at least _some_ pressure to actually keep their word on privacy (as small as that pressure turns out to be in practice). Maybe not the search queries themselves, but at least keep the user information (payment data, personal preferences, etc) within the EU.
sh4rks 4y ago
Blacklist Quora I use DuckDuckGo with Firefox Android + ublock on my phone. DDG is great for simpler queries. On my desktop, I use Google. My query usually ends with "reddit". If there's a subreddit for the topic I'm trying to find out about, I'll use Reddit's subreddit search feature (as horrendous as it is). For work - Google. I sometimes use site:stackoverflow.com. Recently, I've also tried asking ChatGPT for simple code snippets.
- bdavisx 4y ago
  For searching a subreddit from google, you can do site:reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT
Gualdrapo 4y ago
Not an answer to the question by any means (now I find new stuff in Reddit), but recently I've noted that when you search something enclosed in double quotes with Google, for the second page it will remove them
rene_d 4y ago
Very happy with kagi. As good as google in its best days, if not better. In 19 out of 20 cases the first link is what I need, for both private and work related searches. Very fast, no ads.
eliseumds 4y ago
Mostly Reddit or Twitter via Google.
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
Google: Any research starts here. ChatGPT: Coding, writing, configuration help. Seamless.ai & linkedIN: People search. Youtube: Topical info, deep dives. SeekingAlpha: Finance. Twitter & 4chan/pol/: Breaking news (after sifting through the poison, shitposts & disinfo). Reddit: Deep dives & medical & reviews.
altdataseller 4y ago
I use Twitter Search and sort by Top threads.
marmetio 4y ago
I've reverted my expectations about search engines to what they were in the early days, dusted off my old research skills, and accepted that I'm going to have to do some work myself. I still use Google, but its ability to approximate a reference librarian is diminished.
drcongo 4y ago
It's only 4 days since we had [0] "Ask HN: What is your replacement for Google search", the answer then was the same as now, I pay for Kagi because it's excellent. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34643512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34643512
kerpotgh 4y ago
Google. It’s still hands down the best way to find information. If I’m doing research I would start with google and then liberally use SciHub. Nowadays, for brand new areas of interest I start with chatGPT to get an overview then drill down into each new item/keyword using google.
jaredcwhite 4y ago
I use DuckDuckGo 99% of the time, and the 1% I still need Google for, it's 50/50 if I'll find anything useful that I couldn't with DDG. Also Google's search UX these days is a dumpster fire.
pengo 4y ago
I continue using https://startpage.com https://startpage.com without any issues.
_23sd 4y ago
I've been using Brave Search as my default the past ~6 months (previously I was using DuckDuckGo). I think Google is better at the "instant answer" part and its index really shines in some types of searches. Nobody talks much about it anymore but Google Books is amazing, no other search engine has that massive library at its disposal and for really specific topics, a result from an obscure old book is exactly what you need. But that said, I prefer Brave's layout and the quality of the first 2 pages is better for most everyday queries and programming questions. Brave's "Discussions" card is great: it presents threads from forums and Reddit, which gets me to an actually useful thread much faster than opening a bunch of tabs from a Google site search. There is also an interesting feature called "Goggles" for boosting or removing a specific list of domains, for example a list of sites popular on HN. It sounds like a cool idea but to be honest I never use it.
kup0 4y ago
One thing I've noticed is that it seems certain results (bandcamp as an example) strongly prefer a certain word order in the search term. For instance, I can search artist album and not get any bandcamp results but they do appear if I search album artist. So, sometimes just changing word order in your query can make a significant difference
leeches 4y ago
Search is losing the arms race. I think we'll need to revert back to the model of manually curated and moderated listings, a human-approved island, surrounded by an endless sea of autogen noise.
blacklight 4y ago
I have my own SearXNG instance, customized exactly with the search engines and the categories that I want.
ezedv 4y ago
I usually read Rahter Labs' blog: https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog (specially if you like Blockchain technology)
- nicbou 4y ago
  Quit spamming Rather Labs. It has zero relevance here.
elforce002 4y ago
Well, I'm using brave and for dev questions I use shebangs to reddit, SO, etc.
mharig 4y ago
Switched from Google to Startpage, then to duckduckgo, then to swisscows. What really bothers me is that Google Scholar returns more and more crap.
- Euphorbium 4y ago
  I have moved to scinapse.io and it is great. Scholar is dead.
  - Xeophon 4y ago
    Sadly they do not seem to have all the papers. ArXiV is missing completely, e.g. searching for „Attention is all you need“ does not return the paper which has been published on NeurIPS
    - nekopa 4y ago
      I found it on there. It seems to include ArXiV.
  - petra 4y ago
    Could you expand on why is it better?
  - mharig 4y ago
    Didn't know that site. Thanks a lot!
  - leephillips 4y ago
    This is a lump of fetid garbage. I looked myself up. It listed a bunch of facts about me: # of papers and citations, fields of research, names of students and “advisers”. Except every one of these facts was hilariously wrong. I recognized the names—they were all coauthors on some paper. Obviously they use cornpooters to decide what are my relationships to these coauthors, and present the false output of their program as if it were fact. Don’t use this junk. Unless your goal is to be ludicrously misinformed.
leobg 4y ago
For many searches, my first goto is actually Google “keyword site:news.ycombinator.com”.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
Adding hacker news or reddit to the query is a good trick. Especially if you use that to try to find a book reccomendation on the topic your interested in. ChatGPT is a great resource too. It's just one step in a multi step process though. Anything you get you want to go back out to the internet and verify, but that goes for random reddit threads too.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
Euphorbium 4y ago
I use Brave search for general search, google for market search when I am looking to buy something and scinapse.io for academic search.
KomoD 4y ago
Multiple techniques, sometimes site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, but mainly use uBlacklist with my own custom list with 700+ filters.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
Someone should build a nerdsnipe engine. It posts your question on an appropriate forum, uses ChatGPT to formulate a bogus response, then sends you all the replies angrily correcting the first answer.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Then someone will build an anti-nerdsnipe engine using ChatGPT to angrily correct the incorrect ChatGPT answer. It's going to be one hell of a future.
  - kleer001 4y ago
    I'm not looking forward to the balkanization of the internet. It's very convenient at the moment.
mancerayder 4y ago
Reddit keyword added to the google search, a bunch of people said, and I do the same. I do the same search on google and duckduckgo, and get equally interesting but different results. Diversity of viewpoints is great! What is wrong with these search engine product folks at Google? They've created a big opportunity to destroy their moat.
jjdeveloper 4y ago
Good youtube video here that covers a lot this, quite an interesting watch even if it just confirms what you have already been seeing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48AOOynnmqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48AOOynnmqU
aprdm 4y ago
reddit.. already gamed, likely to be gamed more and owned by bots/chatgtp
mechanical_bear 4y ago
Bing. I guess.
plaguepilled 4y ago
Duckduckgo. Not because the search is good, but because it works behind any proxy. Google's captcha bullshit is not worth the mediocre results.
- shortcake27 4y ago
  Yep. I started getting captchas on every Google search, not sure if it was due to iCloud private relay or WARP. I’d rather spend a bit more time tweaking DDG than completing a captcha.
fwungy 4y ago
Kagi.com is pretty good. It's like how Goofle used to work. I'm saving my free searches on it. May pay for it eventually. A curated search like the original Yahoo! would be nice. Goofle hides a lot of my preferred sources.
- the_generalist 4y ago
  Goofle is a great company name
giaour 4y ago
I've mostly reverted to 90s-style browsing: there are some sites that I check regularly, and I'll follow outbound links if the title seems interesting.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
We need quality blogs resolving every problem but there is AI now...
rchaud 4y ago
I'm getting good value from newsletters these days.
nvln 4y ago
All programming related queries (and ones where I can attest to the validity with my knowledge or commonsense) -> Chat GPT. Others -> Chat GPT with cross checking with DDG and Wikipedia. News -> Twitter, Google News with extensive cross checking.
throwaway28385 4y ago
Kagi. Been paying for 5-ish months or so. The ROI is huuuge. Between personal and work use, I do 500-700 searches/month and I find what I need very quickly about 90% of the time. Also benefits my cow-orkers as they don’t have to listen to my incessant bitching about “suggestion engines” and other nonsense that the likes of Google & friends have become. Beside the lack of ads and tracking, other features like pin/rank/block of sites are super useful at streamlining results.
0x008 4y ago
I’ve been using duck duck go for years and have been happy. I have not noticed any change in search results quality yet.
darreninthenet 4y ago
People talking about wanting to search like it's the 90s (AV etc) - I remember before they became a thing you could buy thick "yellow pages" of curated web addresses in the computer section in book shops...
mensofgod 4y ago
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mensofgod 4y ago
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rkagerer 4y ago
Duckduckgo has been helpful recently in that it actually respects my hints, like + to require a term.
Pompidou 4y ago
Agree with the fact that google web search is now garbage. I almost always use simultaneously yandex+google. In google I always set a max limit date, usually 2 years back.
warrenm 4y ago
I either use a website I built that subscribes to a host of RSS feeds (https://datente.com https://datente.com), or find stuff via friends' links on LI/Twitter/Facebook (and then add 'good' sources to my Twitter followers, or RSS aggregator), or from HN (and then add to Twitter or RSS), or from people sending me texts/IMs
minimoose 4y ago
I've used ddg for 10 years now. mostly for the bang shortcuts eg "!e mopho" searches ebay.
lattrommi 4y ago
i've been using https://presearch.com/ https://presearch.com/ for a little over a year roughly. it's a search aggregate, which pulls from a custom list of search engines. you can set it up to include or exclude engines from their list of about 100 large sites or add your own. when i do a search, i scan the initial results page and if nothing pops out immediately, i click an icon for a more specific search on the appropriate engine, like wikipedia, reddit, stack exchange, etc. there's some kind of cryptocurrency reward thing too but i couldn't care less about it and it seems a bit scammy but all crypto seems like a scam to me. there's usually an ad or two for the first result. it's clearly marked as such. annoying but i've been trained to ignore the first couple results by google already so they are basically invisible to me. i'm sure this sounds like i'm shilling for them, so i'll add that i do not work for them. i do not work for anyone right now. have a nice day.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Some news aggregation sites have their own integral search.
n1c00o 4y ago
I started learning Google Search operations, and now I almost always append "site:news.ycombinator.com"/"site:reddit.com" for stories and ideas, "filetype:pdf" for work or research papers etc... I would say it works very well as I discover a lot of things, the problem I'm now facing is keeping up with all these awesome materials
standardly 4y ago
i find myself having to do this: "query" -quora -news -post -times -herald -sun -daily but the old "reddit.com:query" trick is the best way i've found
twishmay 4y ago
[dead]
ffwacom 4y ago
For years I used to prepend site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com to Google searches but these are tapped out now as the communities have fully reverted to the mean along with heavy censorship. Currently it’s all through networks like clusters of people on Twitter who work in a niche or even 4chan hearsay to keep on top of things.
Endy 4y ago
If I need anything important, I use Million Short, cut the top million sites, and usually also do -fandom.com for the searches I run.

142 points by nicbou 4y ago

I'm getting tired of repeating every Google search with quotes around each word. What search engine do you clever hackers use these days, and why?

alangibson 4y ago

I'm almost always looking for technical stuff, so I go right to the source. StackOverflow, Reddit, arxiv. Best of all is still hyper-specific dedicated forums where they exist. For shopping I use Geizhals, Idealo or huge sellers like Digikey.

cpach 4y ago

Reddit search. HN search. Yandex. https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ (and Google)

raybb 4y ago

What kind of things are you looking for? I've been using Kagi (a paid search engine with a free tier) and quite like it but tbh it is only marginally better than google at the moment. I've also been trying to ask questions on forums more when I can't find answers (or blog myself) that way people in the future can find the.

smt88 4y ago
Kagi used to be fine. It gets its results from Google, though, and recently it became much worse than Google. I'm back to Google and having a rage aneurysm every time it refuses to respect my quotes (which is always). NLP is the worst thing that ever happened to search, other than SEO and content farms of course.
- mech422 4y ago
  >> LP is the worst thing that ever happened to search, other than SEO and content farms I just wish someone would bring back alta vista with a larger crawl index (or even just a 'specialized' crawl index for tech stuff). The search language was awesome for geeks. Trying to make search engines more appealing to 'casual users' has basically left 'power users' high and dry.
- tome 4y ago
  Interesting. I'm still finding Kagi as good as it was when I started subscribing (perhaps a year ago). I wonder what happened.

danwee 4y ago

yandex.com I usually search for books, movies and mp3s. With Google is kinda hard (or impossible) to do the same.

laserdancepony 4y ago
That‘s Russian IIRC, is it safe to use?
- throw_away1525 4y ago
  Even if Putin himself could read your searches, would you care? I guess don't use Yandex if you're a Ukrainian soldier but otherwise what are you worried about?
  - kerpotgh 4y ago
    Yes, there’s no telling how states like Russia secure that information, disseminate it to other paying customers, leak info about high value citizens to use as kompromat etc.
    - ornornor 4y ago
      That’s a double standard because you could swap yandex and Russia with google and US and also have a very plausible scenario of what’s happening right now.
- danwee 4y ago
  What do you mean by "safe"? It's a search engine, it just returns you search results. If you are worried about JS/tracking... well, Google and others are already tracking you. I use Apple devices, so Apple knows everything about me as well. If you are worried about the links you may click when yandex returns you search results, there is nothing special about yandex, same rules apply as in the wild wild web: double check what you download (e.g., do not double click "rihanna-song1.mp3.exe" on Windows!)
  - 4y ago

actually_a_dog 4y ago

In general, I let a lot of stuff find me via aggregators like Reddit and HN. If I’m searching for specific things, I’ll often go to a specialized site like Stack Overflow. But if I don’t know exactly what I’m after, then it’s the “search Google, put a couple key terms in quotes, repeat” dance.

stef25 4y ago
G doesn't really cut it anymore for me. Anything related to cooking, traveling, health ... nothing but crap.

Nicksil 4y ago

Duck it https://duck.com https://duck.com

focusedone 4y ago
Duck has come a long way and is seriously useful now. The Bangs are fantastic time savers too. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- folkrav 4y ago
  I do enjoy DDG, but I also still seem to have to use the !g bang to fall back to a Google search more often than I'd like to.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    This. As much as I like the idea of DDG, any time I try to use it again I end up having to add !g more than half the time.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    I was like that a few years ago when I started using it. With time I realised that my query was just not returning the expected results in DDG so I'd just add the !g as a reflex. That rarely helped though but I kept doing it for a while until I lost the habit. Now I just try different queries in DDG and it may not be miles better than Google but it's definitely not worse. As always, YMMV.
- jlmorton 4y ago
  How are the bangs time savers? They drop you into the search interface of whatever site you're searching, which is fairly universally bad. If I try a search like "Django connection pooling !r," I'm dropped into Reddit's search interface, and the top result is "My pool has water while not being conected to my water system" from /r/RimWorld. This is not useful in the least.
  - 4y ago

throw_away1525 4y ago

I'm still just appending `reddit` to my Google searches to try to find results written by human beings, although I am not optimistic that this technique will work for much longer (or perhaps even 100% of the time now).

rationalist 4y ago
The vast majority of it may still be written by humans, but they may not all be impartial humans; companies pretend to be end users and shill their products via reddit comments.

zelias 4y ago

I append the word "reddit" to most non-technical google searches. Platform has been around long enough that _someone_ on it has discussed the issue I'm looking for

borplk 4y ago
Google used to have a "forums" search type option which brought up some great results from forums. The "reddit" trick seems similar to that.
rdudek 4y ago
I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam. Most of the time, the advice is legit.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I've been doing this too with additional step to check the user's post history to make sure it's not some SEO spam How exactly you do this? People sell their "organically grown" reddit accounts all the time, so they look like normal users, while just a specific post is the ad itself, then the account is dumped after that.
  - Serenacula 4y ago
    You can sell your Reddit account? Where and for how much?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      PlayerUp.com, Signals.sh, EpicNPC.com, the number of sites you can sell your social media account is endless. Don't expect to get too much from it though.
dzek69 4y ago
it doesn't work for me. The only threads I can find on reddit are those that are dead and unanswered :(

thedriver 4y ago

I'm not sure if it's that much better, but I've been thinking about moving to some "non big tech" search engine such as https://gigablast.com https://gigablast.com

racl101 4y ago

Work stuff: I still just run queries on Google. If I know it's a stackexchange site I'll just go directly to the site in question. Other [everyday] stuff: It depends. Sometimes I Google it, sometimes I do Google / Reddit search. In short, Google ain't that broken for me. Sure, I hate that the top results are usually ads but it's not that bad to motivate me to change. I'm just not logged on to Google when I search for stuff. And no, I have no weird searches that I need to hide. I'm a normie.

jchw 4y ago
> And no, I have no weird searches that I need to hide. I'm a normie. I'm guessing this is mostly in jest but I doubt most people, even privacy conscious people, really search anything that interesting, it's more about the idea of being able to build a long-term profile of someone based on search history. And anyway, the less "normie" you are, the more shameless you are, I'd argue. Heck, there's a lot of reasons to temporarily want some degree of privacy or at least a little isolation. If I was going to search about a medical issue, I'd at least use private browsing, because I don't want advertisements about it to flood me.
- racl101 4y ago
  Yeah all fair points. Being advertised to sucks.

satoqz 4y ago

I've been selfhosting SearXNG [0] for a few months and cannot complain. It's a meta search engine, i.e. collects results from a variety of underlying search engines including Google (if enabled). The main selling points for me are: - No ads - Improved Privacy - Open Source - Customisability (Plugins, Search Engines) I'm quite content with the search results even though they're not quite on par with the quality that Google used to have. [0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng

pkulak 4y ago
I tried that for a while but it's so slow. Couldn't take it and finally broke down and started paying for Kagi.
seanw444 4y ago
+1. I was about to suggest this in my own comment. SearX/SearXNG can also improve anonymity if you use a public instance, too. I choose to selfhost however, as the ultimate customization and ownership of the instance is more important to me than anonymity. I find very interesting "indie" webpages frequently alongside my normal searches with Wiby results enabled. Wiby is actually fantastic. In response to the sibling commenter mentioning its slowness: it takes some getting used to, but honestly waiting a couple seconds versus half a second for results isn't a big deal with the wealth of relevant information it gives. With about a half dozen engines enabled, I'm getting like 3-4 second response times, and that's on DigitalOcean's second lowest-tier VPS.
drewbitt 4y ago
DuckDuckGo keeps banning me for using it via SearXNG. I’m the only user on my host

nerddadnear40 4y ago

Welp, time to short Google in the long run. For whatever topic I'm interested in, I'll search reddit to find where the hardcore fanbase is. For example, if I'm interested in flashlights, that would be candlepower forums. The echo chambers have grown to substantial epicenters now. Give me a search engine that finds those and puts search in it and I'd pay $5 a month for that because at that point, you've found the expert and active community and looking at cutting edge knowledge bases. I suppose it's what the academic and scientific communities used to be before subsidies and blue church ruined it.

alangibson 4y ago
If there's one thing I'm 100% sure of, it's that letting your in products go to crap does not necessarily decrease your stock price. With a commanding position you can extract rents up until you get disrupted put of business. And with good enough lawyers and lobbyists you can avoid disruption indefinitely.
- muzani 4y ago
  It takes a long time though. Meta is a great example. People pointed to stock price as proof that whatever they were doing works. But after a while, they realized that Facebook is screwed and pivoted away from the branding of Facebook. The Meta announcement was merely confirmation that they had indeed gone to crap, and that's what made shares plummet. It's also why I'm not a major supporter of data-driven decisionmaking because the data used to make decisions can come in too late. A common mistake is to annoy users with things that make money, and then observe that money is coming in. But at some point, users leave en masse because they're just sick of how things are. By the time you get the data, the cash cow is terminally ill.
AmericanOP 4y ago
Google is a better search engine of Reddit than Reddit. Especially the app search which is a bloody mess.
- YourDadVPN 4y ago

xnx 4y ago

Google. It's fantastic. Gets me the information I'm looking for in 1-2 queries, tops. Often the answer is right on the result page without even needing to click into a bunch of crappy sites.

rfrey 4y ago
Your search needs must be somewhat niche. Are you doing PhD research on content farms?
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Having decent google fu never stopped being important, you can still find what you're looking for just fine most of the time if you know how to ask google to find that for you.
  - throw_away1525 4y ago
    So what does your 2023 google fu look like?
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      I have no idea how to answer that, because it depends on what I'm looking for, and involves making sure I have the terms that go with the subject I'm looking for.
      - anyfoo 4y ago
        That approach used to work well for the past ~20 years or so on Google, and effectively stopped working recent-ish.
      - valdiorn 4y ago
        That IS google-fu :)
  - mech422 4y ago

dzek69 4y ago

Google. Only searchpage.com is close to Google for actually returning me something I look for, but I'm just used to Google so I continue to use it. Ads are hidden for me, so I just get the results and usually when I cannot find something it's just because it doesn't exist.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

To be honest, I usually don't.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

Google has now become what search engines were like before Google came. I remember putting plus signs and quotes to get a query to return even a modicum of descent results.

jasonlotito 4y ago

DuckDuckGo.

revskill 4y ago
duckgo.com is shorter
- LanternLight83 4y ago
  Apparently duck.com works
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    You can set a Default Search Engine in Firefox, and search from your browser without having to go to any URL first.
  - jonathantf2 4y ago
    I still use ddg.gg
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  Nothing is shorter. Firefox let's you setup a default search engine. You can enter your search term from your location bar.

karaterobot 4y ago

For general searches, I use Kagi, even though it's not actually better than Google. The main advantage it has over Google is that (for now at least) it isn't Google. For anything even vaguely related to a product I could pay money for, I abandon all search engines and use reddit. For any topical search, I just go to Wikipedia, or use !w.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
I also use Kagi, via $10/month subscription. Kagi seems to NOT insert sponsored / ad results, unlike Google. I therefore find its signal/noise ratio favorable.

jacooper 4y ago

Brave search is nice. Also bing AI should drop today.

graeme 4y ago

Google or Reddit, depends what I’m looking for. Google does still work for a lot of stuff For the kind of stuff where adding Reddit works, one issue is no one writes blogs anymore. I also append for a lot of things. Like say I am checking a hotel I’ll add review and find sites which wrote reviews and aren’t just aggregators

eimrine 4y ago

Torrent trackers (but not tpb usually). Just search some books on the topic you are interested in and that's it. For example, I used to have 2 medical problems which I have successfully solved using this method. One medical problem of mine I have solved completely and what about another I can prove you there is just no cure (despite of some doctors promise me that they can do it for $$$). That was a lot of reading but no other search engine on Earth can really search any medical stuff and no forums allow to discuss medical problems without a stupid censorship kind of "somebody might hurt yourself if he found this discussion by some wrong reason so we ain't allow you to discuss your medical stuff here".

Asraelite 4y ago
Do you mean public or private trackers?
- eimrine 4y ago
  rutracker.org with my ability to read Russian as my mother language did as much for my education as rest of the Internets. But you may meet some English content there as well, or not language-depended content like music.
suddenclarity 4y ago
Maybe Facebook? I believe there are a ton of semiprivate support groups for different health conditions. But I guess one might need a starting point to be able to find a relevant one since they are specialized.
- eimrine 4y ago
  I am not among the "dumb fucks" to use this service.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Heh I’ve found that the overlap between “medical” anything and charlatans/mysticists/anti-vaxxers is pretty high on Facebook. This may or may not be a feature, depending on the individual.

kjkjadksj 4y ago

On the other hand, theres now plenty of terms where I think, “theres no way I will get specific results with something so vague” and just resign to living in ignorance.

user3939382 4y ago

Kagi. DDG/Bing are ridiculous with ignoring your search terms, even with quotes. I had enough. Google often has a whole page or almost a whole page of clever-widgets before any actual results, not to mention my ethical objections to their behavior and the SEO spam. Kagi works great, I like the fact that I'm paying for it and my interests are primary in the relationship.

anyfoo 4y ago
Same. I basically gave it a try, and stayed with it. I sometimes feel I should make more use of the advanced features, like lenses, but I'm pretty happy with just regular searches, too. Reminds me a lot of how Google used to be.
roughly 4y ago
Kagi’s been fantastic. I started using them out on principle, but it’s a legitimately good search engine. I almost never find myself going back to google, and when I do, Google’s usually not finding anything either.
noisycarlos 4y ago
Same! It's been great so far. I sure don't miss all the sponsored results at the top!
quectophoton 4y ago
The only thing keeping me away from Kagi is that they are US-based. Having some presence in the EU would contribute to peace of mind that your personal data is more or less under jurisdiction of the GDPR, and that there's at least _some_ pressure to actually keep their word on privacy (as small as that pressure turns out to be in practice). Maybe not the search queries themselves, but at least keep the user information (payment data, personal preferences, etc) within the EU.

sh4rks 4y ago

Blacklist Quora I use DuckDuckGo with Firefox Android + ublock on my phone. DDG is great for simpler queries. On my desktop, I use Google. My query usually ends with "reddit". If there's a subreddit for the topic I'm trying to find out about, I'll use Reddit's subreddit search feature (as horrendous as it is). For work - Google. I sometimes use site:stackoverflow.com. Recently, I've also tried asking ChatGPT for simple code snippets.

bdavisx 4y ago
For searching a subreddit from google, you can do site:reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT

Gualdrapo 4y ago

Not an answer to the question by any means (now I find new stuff in Reddit), but recently I've noted that when you search something enclosed in double quotes with Google, for the second page it will remove them

rene_d 4y ago

Very happy with kagi. As good as google in its best days, if not better. In 19 out of 20 cases the first link is what I need, for both private and work related searches. Very fast, no ads.

eliseumds 4y ago

Mostly Reddit or Twitter via Google.

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

Google: Any research starts here. ChatGPT: Coding, writing, configuration help. Seamless.ai & linkedIN: People search. Youtube: Topical info, deep dives. SeekingAlpha: Finance. Twitter & 4chan/pol/: Breaking news (after sifting through the poison, shitposts & disinfo). Reddit: Deep dives & medical & reviews.

altdataseller 4y ago

I use Twitter Search and sort by Top threads.

marmetio 4y ago

I've reverted my expectations about search engines to what they were in the early days, dusted off my old research skills, and accepted that I'm going to have to do some work myself. I still use Google, but its ability to approximate a reference librarian is diminished.

drcongo 4y ago

It's only 4 days since we had [0] "Ask HN: What is your replacement for Google search", the answer then was the same as now, I pay for Kagi because it's excellent. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34643512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34643512

kerpotgh 4y ago

Google. It’s still hands down the best way to find information. If I’m doing research I would start with google and then liberally use SciHub. Nowadays, for brand new areas of interest I start with chatGPT to get an overview then drill down into each new item/keyword using google.

jaredcwhite 4y ago

I use DuckDuckGo 99% of the time, and the 1% I still need Google for, it's 50/50 if I'll find anything useful that I couldn't with DDG. Also Google's search UX these days is a dumpster fire.

pengo 4y ago

I continue using https://startpage.com https://startpage.com without any issues.

_23sd 4y ago

I've been using Brave Search as my default the past ~6 months (previously I was using DuckDuckGo). I think Google is better at the "instant answer" part and its index really shines in some types of searches. Nobody talks much about it anymore but Google Books is amazing, no other search engine has that massive library at its disposal and for really specific topics, a result from an obscure old book is exactly what you need. But that said, I prefer Brave's layout and the quality of the first 2 pages is better for most everyday queries and programming questions. Brave's "Discussions" card is great: it presents threads from forums and Reddit, which gets me to an actually useful thread much faster than opening a bunch of tabs from a Google site search. There is also an interesting feature called "Goggles" for boosting or removing a specific list of domains, for example a list of sites popular on HN. It sounds like a cool idea but to be honest I never use it.

kup0 4y ago

One thing I've noticed is that it seems certain results (bandcamp as an example) strongly prefer a certain word order in the search term. For instance, I can search artist album and not get any bandcamp results but they do appear if I search album artist. So, sometimes just changing word order in your query can make a significant difference

leeches 4y ago

Search is losing the arms race. I think we'll need to revert back to the model of manually curated and moderated listings, a human-approved island, surrounded by an endless sea of autogen noise.

blacklight 4y ago

I have my own SearXNG instance, customized exactly with the search engines and the categories that I want.

ezedv 4y ago

I usually read Rahter Labs' blog: https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog https://www.ratherlabs.com/blog (specially if you like Blockchain technology)

nicbou 4y ago
Quit spamming Rather Labs. It has zero relevance here.

elforce002 4y ago

Well, I'm using brave and for dev questions I use shebangs to reddit, SO, etc.

mharig 4y ago

Switched from Google to Startpage, then to duckduckgo, then to swisscows. What really bothers me is that Google Scholar returns more and more crap.

Euphorbium 4y ago
I have moved to scinapse.io and it is great. Scholar is dead.
- Xeophon 4y ago
  Sadly they do not seem to have all the papers. ArXiV is missing completely, e.g. searching for „Attention is all you need“ does not return the paper which has been published on NeurIPS
  - nekopa 4y ago
    I found it on there. It seems to include ArXiV.
- petra 4y ago
  Could you expand on why is it better?
- mharig 4y ago
  Didn't know that site. Thanks a lot!
- leephillips 4y ago
  This is a lump of fetid garbage. I looked myself up. It listed a bunch of facts about me: # of papers and citations, fields of research, names of students and “advisers”. Except every one of these facts was hilariously wrong. I recognized the names—they were all coauthors on some paper. Obviously they use cornpooters to decide what are my relationships to these coauthors, and present the false output of their program as if it were fact. Don’t use this junk. Unless your goal is to be ludicrously misinformed.

leobg 4y ago

For many searches, my first goto is actually Google “keyword site:news.ycombinator.com”.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

Adding hacker news or reddit to the query is a good trick. Especially if you use that to try to find a book reccomendation on the topic your interested in. ChatGPT is a great resource too. It's just one step in a multi step process though. Anything you get you want to go back out to the internet and verify, but that goes for random reddit threads too.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

Euphorbium 4y ago

I use Brave search for general search, google for market search when I am looking to buy something and scinapse.io for academic search.

KomoD 4y ago

Multiple techniques, sometimes site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, but mainly use uBlacklist with my own custom list with 700+ filters.

rolenthedeep 4y ago

Someone should build a nerdsnipe engine. It posts your question on an appropriate forum, uses ChatGPT to formulate a bogus response, then sends you all the replies angrily correcting the first answer.

deafpolygon 4y ago
Then someone will build an anti-nerdsnipe engine using ChatGPT to angrily correct the incorrect ChatGPT answer. It's going to be one hell of a future.
- kleer001 4y ago
  I'm not looking forward to the balkanization of the internet. It's very convenient at the moment.

mancerayder 4y ago

Reddit keyword added to the google search, a bunch of people said, and I do the same. I do the same search on google and duckduckgo, and get equally interesting but different results. Diversity of viewpoints is great! What is wrong with these search engine product folks at Google? They've created a big opportunity to destroy their moat.

jjdeveloper 4y ago

Good youtube video here that covers a lot this, quite an interesting watch even if it just confirms what you have already been seeing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48AOOynnmqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48AOOynnmqU

aprdm 4y ago

reddit.. already gamed, likely to be gamed more and owned by bots/chatgtp

mechanical_bear 4y ago

Bing. I guess.

plaguepilled 4y ago

Duckduckgo. Not because the search is good, but because it works behind any proxy. Google's captcha bullshit is not worth the mediocre results.

shortcake27 4y ago
Yep. I started getting captchas on every Google search, not sure if it was due to iCloud private relay or WARP. I’d rather spend a bit more time tweaking DDG than completing a captcha.

fwungy 4y ago

Kagi.com is pretty good. It's like how Goofle used to work. I'm saving my free searches on it. May pay for it eventually. A curated search like the original Yahoo! would be nice. Goofle hides a lot of my preferred sources.

the_generalist 4y ago
Goofle is a great company name

giaour 4y ago

I've mostly reverted to 90s-style browsing: there are some sites that I check regularly, and I'll follow outbound links if the title seems interesting.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

We need quality blogs resolving every problem but there is AI now...

rchaud 4y ago

I'm getting good value from newsletters these days.

nvln 4y ago

All programming related queries (and ones where I can attest to the validity with my knowledge or commonsense) -> Chat GPT. Others -> Chat GPT with cross checking with DDG and Wikipedia. News -> Twitter, Google News with extensive cross checking.

throwaway28385 4y ago

Kagi. Been paying for 5-ish months or so. The ROI is huuuge. Between personal and work use, I do 500-700 searches/month and I find what I need very quickly about 90% of the time. Also benefits my cow-orkers as they don’t have to listen to my incessant bitching about “suggestion engines” and other nonsense that the likes of Google & friends have become. Beside the lack of ads and tracking, other features like pin/rank/block of sites are super useful at streamlining results.

0x008 4y ago

I’ve been using duck duck go for years and have been happy. I have not noticed any change in search results quality yet.

darreninthenet 4y ago

People talking about wanting to search like it's the 90s (AV etc) - I remember before they became a thing you could buy thick "yellow pages" of curated web addresses in the computer section in book shops...

mensofgod 4y ago

[flagged]

mensofgod 4y ago

[flagged]

rkagerer 4y ago

Duckduckgo has been helpful recently in that it actually respects my hints, like + to require a term.

Pompidou 4y ago

Agree with the fact that google web search is now garbage. I almost always use simultaneously yandex+google. In google I always set a max limit date, usually 2 years back.

warrenm 4y ago

I either use a website I built that subscribes to a host of RSS feeds (https://datente.com https://datente.com), or find stuff via friends' links on LI/Twitter/Facebook (and then add 'good' sources to my Twitter followers, or RSS aggregator), or from HN (and then add to Twitter or RSS), or from people sending me texts/IMs

minimoose 4y ago

I've used ddg for 10 years now. mostly for the bang shortcuts eg "!e mopho" searches ebay.

lattrommi 4y ago

i've been using https://presearch.com/ https://presearch.com/ for a little over a year roughly. it's a search aggregate, which pulls from a custom list of search engines. you can set it up to include or exclude engines from their list of about 100 large sites or add your own. when i do a search, i scan the initial results page and if nothing pops out immediately, i click an icon for a more specific search on the appropriate engine, like wikipedia, reddit, stack exchange, etc. there's some kind of cryptocurrency reward thing too but i couldn't care less about it and it seems a bit scammy but all crypto seems like a scam to me. there's usually an ad or two for the first result. it's clearly marked as such. annoying but i've been trained to ignore the first couple results by google already so they are basically invisible to me. i'm sure this sounds like i'm shilling for them, so i'll add that i do not work for them. i do not work for anyone right now. have a nice day.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

Some news aggregation sites have their own integral search.

n1c00o 4y ago

I started learning Google Search operations, and now I almost always append "site:news.ycombinator.com"/"site:reddit.com" for stories and ideas, "filetype:pdf" for work or research papers etc... I would say it works very well as I discover a lot of things, the problem I'm now facing is keeping up with all these awesome materials

standardly 4y ago

i find myself having to do this: "query" -quora -news -post -times -herald -sun -daily but the old "reddit.com:query" trick is the best way i've found

twishmay 4y ago

[dead]

ffwacom 4y ago

For years I used to prepend site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com to Google searches but these are tapped out now as the communities have fully reverted to the mean along with heavy censorship. Currently it’s all through networks like clusters of people on Twitter who work in a niche or even 4chan hearsay to keep on top of things.

Endy 4y ago

If I need anything important, I use Million Short, cut the top million sites, and usually also do -fandom.com for the searches I run.