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How do you find relevant technical information online?

Search engines have been dropping in quality significantly within the past decade, and especially within this past year. The noise to signal ratio has been frankly painful.

Can you please share some resources you use when trying to find answers to technical questions?

For example, STEM, academia, engineering, programming, etc.

nothacking ,

I like to look for relevant books on archive.org, but they don’t always have stuff for more obscure topics.

PlexSheep ,
@PlexSheep@feddit.de avatar

When doing technical things, I find the best source to always be the provided documentation. For example, when using an external crate in Rust, docs.rs or when coding a Django Webapp the official Django documentation.

When starting out, these often contain examples or guides/tutorials.

When that does not help, it goes back to putting relevant keywords into the search engine and hoping for the best.

brothershamus ,
@brothershamus@kbin.social avatar

Note that this does not apply to Microsoft. Like, at all. :)

cll7793 OP ,

Thank you all for your answers!

I wanted to add one resource I found that has helped me find even more relevant search results:

A Lemmy Search Enginewww.search-lemmy.com

flambonkscious ,

Oh, awesome! Thanks

StrawberryPigtails ,

I used to start with searching Reddit, though that has been of less help lately. Wikipedia is helpful for getting a baseline if I have no clue about a subject. Lately ChatGPT has been helpful there as well.

And then of course, all search engines still accept boolean searches but you kinda need to 1) know the syntax the engine uses and 2) have a rough idea of what you are looking for.

help.duckduckgo.com/…/syntax/

…microsoft.com/…/advanced-search-options-b92e25f1…

Sorry, no Google documentation was relevant.

HardlightCereal ,

For code I use chagpt for first pass questions. Then I try compiling it and see if gpt is telling the truth

PlexSheep ,
@PlexSheep@feddit.de avatar

I feel like this is a risky approach. LLMs are designed to spit out text that sounds good, that’s all. If it hallucinates important info away, your compiler will not always tell you.

HardlightCereal ,

Yeah, I check stuff with stackoverflow and the documentation

invertedspear ,

Lots of quoting for specific phrases. Instead of searching like I used to using what I feel are relevant key words:

react table sortable

I now have to search for something like

“Best sortable table component for react”

This will lead me to some bullshit listicle that will then give me at least a few items to review, then I take the best one and start typing the components name vs and seeing what auto completes after vs

It’s all become a game and I hate it.

drdabbles ,
@drdabbles@lemmy.world avatar

For all of those topics, I use domain specific sites. So for research I’ll look at arxiv or one of the sites that make research freely available. For programming, I’ll search language mailing lists, documentation, and examples. Searching GitHub also isn’t a bad idea, but watch out for license issues.

Be wary of using tools like got to summarize articles or outright answer questions. There’s no guarantee it will be correct, and if you don’t know the answer you won’t know it’s wrong.

foiledAgain ,

most University Libraries have “guides”. Simply google " guide". eg Stanford Library engineering guide. Result like: [(guides.library.stanford.edu/aa)] From there use any free local library access you might have to get the details.

cll7793 OP ,

Thank you so much!

ChaoticNeutralCzech , (edited )

That’s not how links work in Markdown; some clients will include the )] at the end and break the link. Just use the plain URL guides.library.stanford.edu/aa or create a hyperlink using [this syntax](https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/).

TheAgeOfSuperboredom ,

Wikipedia is pretty good for computer sciency stuff. I’ll often use it as a reference for things like protocols or if I need a quick refresher for some algorithm.

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