HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you find interesting stuff on the internet using Google search?

6 points by hidden-spyder ↗ HN
No matter how much I refine my queries, I get bad results that are mostly blog-spam. Any tips on how I could fix this? The search could be related to anything. I would like to find blog posts and others sharing their experiences and opinions more than the "top 25..." stuff that always pops up and goes on for pages.

7 comments

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tubularhells
Use ddg to escape your search bubble.
speedgoose
Bing is even more vulnerable to SEO spam in my opinion.
severine
I use DDG now, but still, I don't discover much stuff by search engine queries, instead their use to me is to answer specific questions.

To find interesting stuff I mostly use aggregators like HN, MetaFilter, Reddit, etc, and from there I populate my RSS feed to keep track of the good stuff. Can't forget Wikipedia.

Of course other media (such as newspapers, magazines, books, radio shows, etc) has a lot of interesting stuff, and then of course other people knows a lot of interesting things, so if I get an interest on a thing I can start some search on a subject, but if you don't have a specific query in mind, I agree that search engines give weak results.

Interesting question, I hope you get more answers!

dyingkneepad
As much as I also love to hate reddit, whenever I want to read genuine opinions on a subject I go to whatever is the subreddit that discusses it.
joefarish
Agreed, once I started unsubscribing from the low-effort default subreddits (pictures, funny etc) and start finding more niche subreddits I enjoyed the Reddit experience a lot more.

There are also some really cool sites out there that provide recommendations on related subreddits such as https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=python

paulz_
Append either reddit or hacker news to your searches. The threads that are returned will have what you're looking for or they will contain links that do. You can limit the results more agressively by using site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com