I've been searching online content since the 1980s (computerised library catalogues), the Web since the mid/late '90s, Google since 1999, DDG since 2013.
My search-fu is pretty good.
Correction: my search-fu was pretty good. Tactics which used to work, regularly, don't. And I'm often intentionally not searching keywords but framing questions (generally to DDG's Search Assistant) to suss out stuff.
And that works pretty well, for general online stuff.
That's a subset of my searches. Often I'll go directly to a site via DDG bangs, such as HN (!hn by:dredmorbius <something I said once>), Wikipedia (!w <topic>), or a few other specific sites.
Discussion sites are ... dead. Reddit is absolute shit. Far too many discussions have gone into closed channels (Birdsite, FB, Discord, etc.), or ... are simply no longer online.
I do fairly well on the Fediverse, though that's still a pretty small world. (Getting bigger, and punches above its weight or so I find.)
Search engines themselves seem 1) no longer comprehensively index everthing, 2) don't retain previously-indexed content, 3) have fucked with how search queries are processed to a degree that even if the content is online and indexed it's not found, and 4) have polluted SERP rankings such that top results are increasingly irrelevant.
(DDG, on that last point, does permit blocking sites from results, which is useful, though a pain in how I use the site, which doesn't persist such preferences across sessions.)
"Knowing how to use a search engine" no longer affords utility in a way it did, say, five years ago. And things were already starting to rot then.
My search-fu is pretty good.
Correction: my search-fu was pretty good. Tactics which used to work, regularly, don't. And I'm often intentionally not searching keywords but framing questions (generally to DDG's Search Assistant) to suss out stuff.
And that works pretty well, for general online stuff.
That's a subset of my searches. Often I'll go directly to a site via DDG bangs, such as HN (!hn by:dredmorbius <something I said once>), Wikipedia (!w <topic>), or a few other specific sites.
Discussion sites are ... dead. Reddit is absolute shit. Far too many discussions have gone into closed channels (Birdsite, FB, Discord, etc.), or ... are simply no longer online.
I do fairly well on the Fediverse, though that's still a pretty small world. (Getting bigger, and punches above its weight or so I find.)
Search engines themselves seem 1) no longer comprehensively index everthing, 2) don't retain previously-indexed content, 3) have fucked with how search queries are processed to a degree that even if the content is online and indexed it's not found, and 4) have polluted SERP rankings such that top results are increasingly irrelevant.
(DDG, on that last point, does permit blocking sites from results, which is useful, though a pain in how I use the site, which doesn't persist such preferences across sessions.)
"Knowing how to use a search engine" no longer affords utility in a way it did, say, five years ago. And things were already starting to rot then.