I’ve actually been accumulating thoughts on this in my notebook with the intention of writing an LW post at some point, so I guess I might as well dump my better ideas here.
For bigger research projects, I often take notes on what I find, copying and pasting snippets from web pages along with their URL. (You can leave out the URL if you really want and just google the snippet to rediscover the webpage.) It really doesn’t take very much time and it helps me research systematically instead of doing scatterbrained web browsing. I have a standard note format: quote first, then the URL on its own line, then my comments on the URL/quote (each part is optional).
Novelty search engines:
To find information in other languages, you can go to the appropriate language-specific Google homepage (or Google Scholar homepage), translate your query in to the language in question using Google Translate, and then translate the results back in to English. I found lots of good Russian-language info on nootropics this way.
Using Google’s site:yourdomain.com operator can be interesting, e.g. I’d guess if you googled “site:reddit.com how to shave” you’d get better results than just googling “how to shave”. Obviously if you can find a forum, subreddit, or other online community and learn what they think on that topic that can be pretty valuable, or you can just search a ton of intelligent-seeming websites at once (e.g. site:news.ycombinator.com OR site:lesswrong.com OR site:reddit.com OR site:quora.com OR site:xkcd.com OR site:nytimes.com OR site:metafilter.com OR site:stackexchange.com how to learn math). These are ideas I haven’t experimented with super much yet, I’m just throwing them out there.
Quora.com and stackexchange.com are good for asking questions, as are domain-specific forums. You can sometimes find people with specific interests/expertise to talk to by putting the right tags in on omegle.com.
I find myself using Google Trends and the Google Keyword Tool pretty frequently to learn about the popularity of different things. (‘xkcd’ makes a good Google Trends reference point.)
You can also look through Google’s autocomplete (which can generally give you suggested insertions at any point in your query, e.g. to get a bunch of treatment ideas for alcohol addiction, put ” for alcohol addiction” in to the search box, put your cursor before the ” for” at the beginning of your query, then try putting in every letter of the alphabet) and check out quantcast.com’s popularity ranking of websites. If you want to find a better version of something you’re using, try adding “vs” at the end of your query to get a list of alternatives, e.g. “selenium vs ” will give you alternatives to selenium for testing your web application.
To save yourself some time and get an approximate view of what the best posts on a blog are, you can look it up on reddit or hacker news and sort your results by score.
Sites related to finding experts/researchers (not sure how good these are; I’m copying them from somewhere else):
I’ve actually been accumulating thoughts on this in my notebook with the intention of writing an LW post at some point, so I guess I might as well dump my better ideas here.
For bigger research projects, I often take notes on what I find, copying and pasting snippets from web pages along with their URL. (You can leave out the URL if you really want and just google the snippet to rediscover the webpage.) It really doesn’t take very much time and it helps me research systematically instead of doing scatterbrained web browsing. I have a standard note format: quote first, then the URL on its own line, then my comments on the URL/quote (each part is optional).
Novelty search engines:
To find information in other languages, you can go to the appropriate language-specific Google homepage (or Google Scholar homepage), translate your query in to the language in question using Google Translate, and then translate the results back in to English. I found lots of good Russian-language info on nootropics this way.
http://millionshort.com/
http://ca.milliontall.com/
blekko.com, wolframalpha.com, twitter.com
Using Google’s site:yourdomain.com operator can be interesting, e.g. I’d guess if you googled “site:reddit.com how to shave” you’d get better results than just googling “how to shave”. Obviously if you can find a forum, subreddit, or other online community and learn what they think on that topic that can be pretty valuable, or you can just search a ton of intelligent-seeming websites at once (e.g. site:news.ycombinator.com OR site:lesswrong.com OR site:reddit.com OR site:quora.com OR site:xkcd.com OR site:nytimes.com OR site:metafilter.com OR site:stackexchange.com how to learn math). These are ideas I haven’t experimented with super much yet, I’m just throwing them out there.
Quora.com and stackexchange.com are good for asking questions, as are domain-specific forums. You can sometimes find people with specific interests/expertise to talk to by putting the right tags in on omegle.com.
I find myself using Google Trends and the Google Keyword Tool pretty frequently to learn about the popularity of different things. (‘xkcd’ makes a good Google Trends reference point.)
You can also look through Google’s autocomplete (which can generally give you suggested insertions at any point in your query, e.g. to get a bunch of treatment ideas for alcohol addiction, put ” for alcohol addiction” in to the search box, put your cursor before the ” for” at the beginning of your query, then try putting in every letter of the alphabet) and check out quantcast.com’s popularity ranking of websites. If you want to find a better version of something you’re using, try adding “vs” at the end of your query to get a list of alternatives, e.g. “selenium vs ” will give you alternatives to selenium for testing your web application.
To save yourself some time and get an approximate view of what the best posts on a blog are, you can look it up on reddit or hacker news and sort your results by score.
Sites related to finding experts/researchers (not sure how good these are; I’m copying them from somewhere else):
http://www.aiip.org/MemberDirectory
http://www.helpareporter.com/press/
https://profnet.prnewswire.com/
http://www.expertclick.com/
http://www.blackexperts.com/
http://www.openthegovernment.org/article/subarchive/13
http://www.selfgrowth.com/experts.html
The email addresses of prominent academics are often surprisingly easy to find online.