Searching internet 101

This guide is for Windows and chooses Keypirinha as the launcher of choice. Note, however, that it's very easy to adopt similar workflow using Alfred on Mac or Albert on Linux. Whichever launcher you use will massively improve your productivity. I personally got used to launching it with the the combination of keys Alt + space .

TL;DR:

Use Brave browser

Look into private search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Startpage

If you use Google or YouTube do it in the private window

Identify sources of information and then search them through the search engine of your choice

To reduce the friction of launching the search in a browser use some launcher like Keypirinha on Windows, Alfred on Mac or Albert on Linux

In this article I will reveal my strategy for searching for information as a web developer, student and entrepreneur. Also I am not a fan of being the product when it comes to technology and privacy. The question is: "How do I get useful search results that I am looking for without sacrificing my privacy?" It seems like if you want good search results, you need to sell your soul. But as I am going to show, it doesn't need to be that way.

Disclaimer

Let's get the most important thing out of the way. Google has, and most likely will always have the best search results in the industry. No search engine can beat it at the moment, that is a fact. Why? Good question, for the most part, it comes down to the profiling of its users by utilizing gathered information about yourself and millions of people just like you or unlike you. In other words, the algorithm might know more about you than either your family, your spouse or even yourself. That's another, arguably very unsettling fact.

Sure, data profiling enables extraordinary good search results, relevant adds and news that fits your beliefs (!) and personality. But we can easily see how all this data hoarding can go very wrong indeed (remember Brexit?). Frankly, the part that terrifies me the most is the misuse we cannot identify even on the third glance. Also I am not convinced that the giant tech companies have my best interest in mind.

To be fair, it seems like governments are reacting to the privacy threat. Case in point is the European GDPR. To what extent this protection is implemented in practice? As a developer with interest in analytics I am rather skeptical about its effectiveness and would go as far to say that the data party goes on. But that's a whole another debate. But you probably didn't come here because you are interested in my half-baked opinion on the privacy debate. You came here for a solution. Here it goes.

What can we do about it?

It's not a rocket science really. Just be careful when choosing your tools. Always ask yourself questions like:

Who is the owner of this product?

How do they make money, a.k.a. what's their business model?

What is their history of security incidents, any juicy scandals at all?

The trick is just to ask these questions. Don't stop there just yet. Take couple of minutes to make your research. Quick search will do. Communities on reddit are usually my first choice. My favorite stop when hunting for tools is also crowdsourced projects like AlternativeTo or Use This. Everything else will be figured out by your brain for you, if you let it.

Once you have your tools ready, just follow these steps:

Set up your private workflow

Identify good sources of information

Use built-in search engine tools to search through them

Profit

Let me walk you through it step-by-step.

Privacy first search setup

Over many years, I have identified that the most privacy-centered productivity setup when it comes to searching on Windows is the following:

Brave Browser, a chromium based Browser with built in privacy tools like tracker blocker adblocker, and most importantly it doesn't track you (available for all your devices)

DuckDuckGo , a search engine that doesn't track you

Startpage, an anonymous search engine that uses the power of Google results

Keypirinha with it's Websearch plugin (For Windows) or other launcher of your choice

Set Brave Browser in settings as your default browser by going:

WIN key → type Default apps → Web Browser → Choose Brave

Identify a good source of information

Before you go any further, it's always good to realize what you know, or don't know about the topic you are going to be researching. Are you trying to understand a difficult concept? Then seemingly counterintuitive advice is not to go to Wikipedia. If you are in the infancy phase of your understanding, your best friend would be the subreddit r/explainlikeimfive/ or ELI5 for short. This is probably my most used resource for cryptic school definitions. Consider it and maybe some images and YouTube videos before jumping in the encyclopedia arena riddled with technical definitions.

The thing is that identifying credible and actionable sources of information can be tricky. I am almost about to say that this is a trial & error operation. There are, however, some sources that hardly ever let me down. Those are among others the aforementioned rabbit hole of reddit forums, stack overflow for programming related problems or its perhaps lesser known 176 alternatives for myriad of different facets like math, philosophy, physics (well pretty much anything people ask questions about) all aggregated under stack exchange. An honorable mention in the same spirit as the previous suggestions is Quora. I cannot possibly outline all the good sources for all facets of life available on the internet so let me list just a few more of my favorites for developers:

MDN, Documentation Bible for Web Developers

Web.Dev, collection of modern & up to date Web Technology tutorials, enough said

Medium, developer tutorials and solution to problems they have faced

CSS-tricks, a wonderful resources for not only CSS tutorials and guides

YouTube, when used right is a priceless resource of visual knowledge

Github, not only repository of code, but even personal knowledge bases and more

And of course, the documentation of the programming language/technology you use is a mandatory goto source.

Searching

Once you have identified a great source of information, it can be tempting to use the search bar of a given website. Let me just briefly address those "search" features on websites. I am yet to find some website where the search implementation gives me what I am looking for (unless you are on Amazon or some other e-commerce page of course). I don't trust these "hand-made" search engines. My experience with them is that they don't work, end of story.

So what's the better way? Well, what if I told you that the search engine can do all the heavy lifting for you. You just need to now how.

Accelerate your search

Before we get into searching the website through a search engine, let me show you the concept of how I remove the friction of having to open up the browser, typing the URL and then searching. That's way too much work and becomes tiring very quickly.

The plugin in the Keypirinha launcher Websearch can be easily configured using the file websearch.ini .

All you have to do is to open up the Keypirinha launcher (Alt+ Space in my case) and type Configure Package: Websearch.

Hit the first suggestion and websearch.ini opens up side by side with it's read-only version.

Here you can predefine your URL that will be automatically opened when called using your keyword.

For instance, I have predefined rule which when I type dic (as dictionary) and an English word, this triggers opening of the new tab of your browser with the URL where %s is replaced by the searched term. The URL that is used to search for the word in the dictionary is https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/%s .

The entire rule then looks like the following:


[predefined_site/dic]
url = <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/%s>

Easy right? You just define the rule in the square brackets [predefined_site/yourShortcutName] and on the next line you put url with assigned URL where %s at the end is replaced by what you search for. So let's search for the definition of the mainframe.

And that's all there is to the magic. Entering this will open up new tab of your Browser with the URL which gives you the definition of the mainframe, simple as that. In the same way you can pass what you are searching for to the URL of your search engine.

Searching a website

Let's say you want to search solution to your bug and you know that Stack Overflow has all the answers. So let's search through it. Put the following rule into your rules in websearch.ini


[predefined_site/stack]
url =
    <https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=site:stackoverflow.com+%s>
    <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&> sites=stackoverflow.com

Save it and use and use it after by:

Launching the Keypirinha launcher Alt + space

typing stack and hit Tab key

type what you search for and hit Enter

Notice that we have 2 URLs. That means that we will open 2 new tabs. This isn't limited and can be as many URLs (opened tabs) as you want.

Now that 2 new tabs have opened, 1 includes results from DuckDuckGo and the other one Startpage is mirroring the results you would get in Google.

This is basically an alternative to opening up both DuckDuckGo or Startpage and typing:


problem description of some sort blah blah site:stackoverflow.com

which in turn searches the Stack Overflow website using both search engines. Cool right? There's much more that DuckDuckGo can do, but this does most of what I personally need.

This isn't limited to the entire site search-through but can be targeted to some specific part of the website. Getting back to our example with subreddit ELI5, this technique is actually an official recommendation how to search through this subreddit. So again, the rule is:


[predefined_site/eli5]
url = <https://www.google.cz/search?q=site:reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive%20%s>

Time to understand stuff you were too afraid to ask.

Should you decide to ditch launchers and use just the search engine itself, here are some useful tips to improve your search results in any search engine:

if you want that your results include some specific word, wrap them in quotation marks, e.g. results must now contain"word" in addition to your other searching terms

type @ in front of a word to search social media

put in front of word that should not be in the search result

type # in front of a word to search hashtags

more tips by DuckDuckGO & Google

Concerning Google

Similar search techniques can be applied to Google, just beware that there isn't a guarantee that your searches are not linked to you. The very least you can do to mitigate this when using Google is to open private window using Ctrl + Shift + N. Then again there might be some wizardry that can identify you like the resolution of your window, some tiny piece of information which your processor or GPU renders in very specific way so that your PC is uniquely identified and so on and so on. The very same thing applies to watching YouTube videos. Alternatively, you can watch YouTube videos privately in DuckDuckGo environment.

For overly secretive humans out there

This might be a bit over the scope of this article but if you want to go even more private (chances are that you are a bit paranoid) you can use TOR and VPN for ultimate untraceability. Needless to say, this will be SLOW, very SLOW. And here lies the problem there isn't such thing as completely secure and private. There is always one more thing to look out for. Like everything in life, there is a compromise to be made. I think my approach above is a pretty good deal. What do you think?

Bonus round: SearX

Currently I am investigating this nice metasearch engine searX aggregating results from 70 search services. That's certainly a good candidate for my workflow.

Conclusion

With a little configuration, you can browse and search for information privately. Brave browser seems like the best option for the private browsing on the market right now. DuckDuckGo and Startpage are search engines to consider if you care about your privacy. If you are not currently using any launcher, I am certain that this will catapult your productivity to new dimensions. Of course for strictly scientific information these techniques are not the best way to go as any academic will tell you. But it's always a good start and in every day life these techniques prove sufficient. Hopefully these tips were helpful. Let me know what strategies you use.