While I use GUI JS-enabled browsers, when at a real keyboard, with a shell and terminal enabled (or even on Termux in Android), fast command-line lookups are useful. Unfortunately, much of the Web formats poorly (HN included).

I have locally defined bash functions for DuckDuckGo (ddg), the Online Etymological Dictionary (etym), weather, and stock quotes (well, plus extensive cruft-stripping for the latter). DDG + bang searches gets me numerous other services, particularly Worldcat, which wins the award for least-useful web design: it breaks on both mobile GUI and console devices, though at full screen rendered by w3m it's passable (I'm considering how to extract and present useful info bypassing the web design entirely).

Third-party utilities give further resources: surfraw for a whole slew of sites, rvt (no longer maintained :-( ) for Reddit, and a set of Wikipedia tools. There's dict/dictd for dictionary lookups (including forwarding OSX queries to my Debian Linux box which has both a server and far better dictionaries).

For RSS I wrote a far-too-complex "rsstail-pretty" which reads from a set of feeds and restructures output -- because there's all kinds of useless and annoying crap in RSS feed content. Similar tricks for stockquote (a bash function wrapper around an awk script) and weather (bash function, sed, and awk -- because features of each are required).

The browser or http agent (w3m, curl, wget, generally) fires once, grabs content, and gets out of the way in many cases. No 25GB VSS memory allocations (yes! Firefox) resident for hours or days.

The amount of useless cruft wrapped around desired information payloads makes the Saturn V launch / return capsule mass ratio look downright sleek.

Particular disappointments: Archive.org, entirely useless without JS.