80% of what I’m looking for can be found in Wikipedia or on forums.
As a (now former) sysadmin, my next go-to has been Arch Wiki– probably the best example of Linux documentation in the world.
Referencing documentation frequently has been a welcome change overall. Man pages (manual pages built into Linux/UNIX/etc systems) are vital to how I get work done now.
This has been a net positive for my brain space, as I’m a pretty extroverted person and I like chatting with folks. Instead of searching for an answer right away, an answer which might be laden with inaccuracies and SEO nonsense, I was getting a chance to ask folks how to solve problems. Forums, group chats, Mastodon, that sort of thing.
I’m a sample of one, but I feel like this experiment has helped me get closer to the sites I use everyday.
This blog post felt very relatable to me. It’s the way I’ve been using the web for a few years now, though I hadn’t been quite as judicious about staying away from general search engines.
I think Mojeek does a good job of surfacing the last 20% of what I’m looking for.
With the help of Mojeek, I had the same epiphany, where I noticed that most of my queries are directed to a small pool of sites, I tend to seek forums, and proper documentation beats a search engine.
Sadly, why Mojeek helped is because IT IS the downside. As the author stated, not using a search engine slows down finding information. This is exactly what I experienced in Mojeek, where certain sites not appearing in results let me realize how reliant I am on those sites, and like the author, I’m forced to resort to using those sites’ search engines.
Although I decided to keep using Mojeek as I believe in their goal of creating an independent search engine, I really hope that one day, they would be able to index all the pages in those sites I frequently use. Once that happens, Mojeek Focus could become a great utility for achieving speed and convenience that I seek.
Yeah, it’s not the full 20%, but to be fair, no search engine manages the last 20% I’m looking for; there’s stuff I can’t find no matter how hard I try. Personally, I really want Japanese results in Mojeek some day.
But getting into the habit of searching Wikipedia directly a few years ago has been an amazing timesaver, at least. I have quite a few search engines setup in Firefox, since it makes it so easy:
