Comment by l72 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by l72 | Hacker News Reader

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I am curious how often others actually use a general search engine and what their searches are. I probably only search (using duck duck go) two or three times a week. This week it was for:

1. A very specific error message nodejs was giving me on one platform about ssl. I usually end up doing site:stackoverflow.com

2. A firmware upgrade for an NVR system (hunting through the manufacturer's website was futile, so I did a search site site:manufacturer.com)

And in both of these cases, while I was using ddg, I was only using it as an index into a specific site, rather than searching the internet.

Other things that I search for, I tend to go to a more direct search engine. If I want to know about a thing/person/event, I just search wikipedia. If I am looking up a band, I just search metal-archives or bandcamp. For movies/cast, straight to imdb. For computer products, straight to newegg. For news, I go straight to my preferred new sources. For Elixir questions, straight to elixir forums. Restaurants, straight to maps.

So, what is it everyone is actually using Google (or other general search engines) for?

If I search for something that I know I'll likely find on a "specialized" site, like your IMDB, etc examples, I'll go there. Most Linux-related stuff, I'll first try my luck on the Arch wiki.

But for general searches, I'll hit google.

A few months ago I was looking to buy a NVMe drive, so I hit google looking for product reviews, etc. I don't do this often enough, so even though I know some of the usual review sites by name, I don't usually think of going there right away.

I'm looking to set something up on windows at work. I'm not a windows guy, and it's not something very common, so my colleagues can't help. Windows docs are questionable on this subject. Hit google up looking for this and found some random blogs.

For tech searches, I often end up on either some stack exchange site or that product's forum. But not always, and I don't tend to look there in priority. I sometimes get reddit results, but I absolutely loathe the experience, so I try to avoid going there as much as possible.

To your point, I don't do it all day every day, but it's pretty much my go-to way of looking "new" stuff up.

If you’ve used IMDb, you may enjoy tmdb.org . It is much, much faster, and has good coverage. I rarely need to fall back to IMDb unless it’s something quite obscure.

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