[HN Gopher] Internet Search Tips
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Internet Search Tips
Author : hargup
Score : 210 points
Date : 2021-04-17 21:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gwern.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gwern.net)
| CompArtisan wrote:
| Quite 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.
| _Microft wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Great summary of tips
|
| Long ago I realized the the only reason I have a job is my
| ability to google stuff lol
| lancesells wrote:
| I feel the same. Just talking the time to search and leave no
| stone unturned makes so many things much easier.
| maddyboo wrote:
| I 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
|
| [1]: https://github.com/b0o/surfingkeys-conf
|
| [2]: https://github.com/b0o/surfingkeys-conf#screenshots
| jraby3 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Yeah, 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.
| lavoiems wrote:
| A neat trick that is not presented is to use
| https://www.connectedpapers.com/
|
| The website presents a graph of related works clustered by
| similarities.
| domenicrosati wrote:
| 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
| zeeshanqureshi wrote:
| Great 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 wrote:
| Maybe 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.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Well 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.
| zeeshanqureshi wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It is easy to forget a tool which one rarely needs, there
| is nothing stupid about that in my opinion :)
| zeeshanqureshi wrote:
| True :)
| gwern wrote:
| Should just link to https://www.gwern.net/Search - the URL works
| fine, and the IA version has various glitches like the link
| icons.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Comparing 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)?
| traceroute66 wrote:
| The IA version is also over a year out of date (2020-01-21 vs
| 2021-03-29)
| dang wrote:
| Changed from https://web.archive.org/web/20210307110938/https:/
| /www.gwern.... Thanks!
| jl6 wrote:
| Fravia's searchlores for the 21st century!
| tomcooks wrote:
| Way to few Latin mottos to be even close to SL /s
| the_arun wrote:
| The 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 :)
| Black101 wrote:
| Push the reader button in the address bar?
| the_arun wrote:
| In Brave browser reader mode is not enabled if shield is
| enabled for the site. So I had to disable shield to see
| reader mode. Not intuitive, but there is work around.
| Black101 wrote:
| What is their reasoning for blocking reader mode by
| default?
| tux wrote:
| Thanks for the article, this reminded me of GHDB;
| https://www.exploit-db.com/google-hacking-database
| effnorwood wrote:
| Type in words of interest
| grimgrin wrote:
| off base question, i suppose inspired by porch sitting + reading
| gwern's 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
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Some 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 wrote:
| Bing is also significantly less censored, especially for adult
| content, but also has a smaller index than Google and less
| operators.
| derefr wrote:
| Is there a search portal that does backend-side searches of all
| these politically-disjoint large search providers, and then
| merges and deduplicates the result?
| [deleted]
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I see Gwern doesn't encourage using operands in DDG.
|
| Maybe that's because DDG ignores them.
| inetsee wrote:
| DDG does support some search operands.
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| We'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.
| mikevin wrote:
| I 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.
| sneak wrote:
| Google does this shit too, to a slightly lesser extent.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Google 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 wrote:
| This 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.
| sneak wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| To 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?
| userbinator wrote:
| Unfortunately, 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.
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(page generated 2021-04-18 23:00 UTC)