Gwern lays it out for you to play it out

Your only search guaranteed to fail is the one you never run

Gwern

Use Verbatim mode for literal matching.

Who knew? Gwern.

Explore the Internet’s attic. I didn’t even know the Internet Archive existed!

The Internet Archive (IA) deserves special mention as a target because it is the Internet’s attic, bursting at the seams with a remarkable assortment of scans & uploads from all sorts of sources—not just archiving web pages, but scanning university collections, accepting uploads from rogue archivists and hackers and obsessive fans and the aforementioned Indian/Chinese libraries with more laissez-faire approaches.⁵ This extends to its media collections as well—who would expect to find so many old science-fiction magazines (as well as many other magazines), a near-infinite number of Grateful Dead recordings, the original 114 episodes of Tom and Jerry, or thousands of arcade & console & PC & Flash games (all playable in-browser)? The Internet Archive is a veritable Internet in and of itself; the problem, of course, is finding anything…

So not infrequently, a book may be available, or a paper exists in the middle of a scan of an entire journal volume, but the IA will be ranked very low in search queries and the snippet will be misleading due to bad OCR. A good search strategy is to drop the quotes around titles or excerpts and focus down to site:archive.org and check the first few hits by hand. (You can also try the relatively new “Internet Archive Scholar”, which appears to be more comprehensive than Google-site-search.)

View your Evernote or OneNote stash like a personalized search engine. Excellent way to think about those tools.

Clippings: note-taking services like Evernote/Microsoft OneNote: regularly making and keeping excerpts creates a personalized search engine, in effect.

This can be vital for refinding old things you read where the search terms are hopelessly generic or you can’t remember an exact quote or reference; it is one thing to search a keyword like “autism” in a few score thousand clippings, and another thing to search that in the entire Internet! (One can also reorganize or edit the notes to add in the keywords one is thinking of, to help with refinding.) I make heavy use of Evernote clipping and it is key to refinding my references.

Snore. Snore. I know, everyone is tired of the AI conversation. But how do these search techniques change with Chat GPT 4 or tools like Perplexity?

Read all of Gwern’s Internet Search Tips here. Table of Contents included!

h/t Tyler Cowen?