How do you find stuff on the internet now?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Switched from Google to Startpage, then to duckduckgo, then to swisscows.
What really bothers me is that Google Scholar returns more and more crap.
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.
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.
yandex.com
I usually search for books, movies and mp3s. With Google is kinda hard (or impossible) to do the same.
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.
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.
I either use a website I built that subscribes to a host of RSS feeds (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
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.
Duckduckgo. Not because the search is good, but because it works behind any proxy. Google's captcha bullshit is not worth the mediocre results.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
For many searches, my first goto is actually Google “keyword site:news.ycombinator.com”.
To be honest, I usually don't.
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.
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.
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.
i've been using 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.
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
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.
I’ve been using duck duck go for years and have been happy. I have not noticed any change in search results quality yet.
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.
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
I have my own SearXNG instance, customized exactly with the search engines and the categories that I want.
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.
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Multiple techniques, sometimes site:reddit.com, site:news.ycombinator.com, but mainly use uBlacklist with my own custom list with 700+ filters.
I use Brave search for general search, google for market search when I am looking to buy something and scinapse.io for academic search.
I've used ddg for 10 years now. mostly for the bang shortcuts eg "!e mopho" searches ebay.
Duckduckgo has been helpful recently in that it actually respects my hints, like + to require a term.
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.
Well, I'm using brave and for dev questions I use shebangs to reddit, SO, etc.
We need quality blogs resolving every problem but there is AI now...
Some news aggregation sites have their own integral search.
I'm getting good value from newsletters these days.
Brave search is nice.
Also bing AI should drop today.
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.
I use Twitter Search and sort by Top threads.
Mostly Reddit or Twitter via Google.
reddit.. already gamed, likely to be gamed more and owned by bots/chatgtp