A Time Capsule of My Search Skills

I believe that the rise of LLMs could change the way we search for websites and information on the internet. We are already seeing some products like Perplexity trying to redefine how we search for information online.

In my particular case, I use Google less and LLMs more to find the information I need, but the "googling" skill is still very important if you want to be a good developer.

As a way to leave a historical record, I will share my method of googling here, and I hope to review it in the future to see how it has changed.

Tips

Filter a Particular Site

site: is the most useful filter for me. I use it to filter results from Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc.

site:exploit-db.com CVE-2021-44228

site:github.com CVE-2021-44228

Filter by Date

Sometimes you are looking to get opinions on a tool or a library on a particular site. Generally, you want to see the most recent opinions. This is where the after: filter comes in handy.

site:reddit.com after:2023 polars

site:reddit.com after:2023 pandas

Filter by Specific File Type

Sometimes you are looking for a PDF, a video, etc. This filter is very useful for filtering results by file type using filetype:.

binomial distribution filetype:pdf

Change the Location of the Results

Another barrier to searching the web is the location of the results. I haven't found any filter that effectively addresses this. I've tried several times to use some filters and query parameters, but none of them yield the results I want. So, what I do now is use a VPN (I currently use Mullvad) to change my location and see the desired results. This is particularly useful when you are looking for a video or news that is only available in a particular country.

Use the Right Keywords

You need to use the right keywords to get the results you want. Knowing what you are looking for and selecting the appropriate keywords is essential. It's hard for me to provide specific tips for that because it's something I do automatically now. I'm not special in any way, but you notice this when you see someone else searching for something in their own way. This is a skill that develops with practice, but it never hurts to look for tips on how others approach it.

Ask ChatGPT for Help

Sometimes you don't know the right terminology to search for something, and it is useful to ask ChatGPT for help with that. Ask it to give you options and similar terminology or tools that relate to the idea or problem you have. That way, you can start to assign names to the concepts you are looking for.

An example of this is searching for "google dorks."

Google dorks are a hacker technique that uses Google Search and other Google applications to find security holes in the configuration and computer code that websites are using.

This is a term that I didn't know until a few years ago, and it's hard to come up with the right keywords to search for it.

Another example was when I was looking for "how to compare two dicts in Python," and it suggested "DeepDiff," which is a library that I didn't know and found very useful.

Final Thoughts

From time to time, I try to add new tricks to my search process, and after all these years, these are the most useful ones I can articulate today. As you can see, I have already started to integrate the use of LLMs into my search process, and I expect that in the future I will use them more and more.