Ask HN: How do you find non-commercial content on the Web nowadays? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find non-commercial content on the Web nowadays?

15 pointshk__213 comments

When you’re interested by a new subject, how do you find interesting information on the Web amidst all the ad-filled websites that try to sell you stuff?

For example, say you want to improve the Wikipedia article "Pickaxe". Excluding everything related to the tool in Minecraft and other games, all I get on Google are a bunch of websites selling pickaxes, some dictionnary entries, some companies named [a variation of] "Pickaxe". There must be a couple non-commercial websites talking about pickaxes but none of them appear in the first 5 pages of Google results.

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Turn that around: When you find some informative or interesting page, without commercial purpose and supported only by someone's passion and desire to share their joy: what can you do to help them?

Free hosting turns into "feed our walled garden" as well as "conform to our social and political opinion". Tipping and donations work for a very few, poorly.

There used to be a lot more little sites where someone shared their passion for the joy of doing so; thos live on in NLP models and clickbait farms but the original creators often couldn't locate a copy now.

I use "site:" in my searches. For example, if I want a starting point for looking up a molecule, medication, supplement, etc... I go to google or bing and use "site:nih.gov some_search_terms" or "site:examine.com some_search_terms". If I am unsure what domains to start with, I follow the suggestion by PaulHoule in this thread and of course I also use uBlock and NoScript to avoid some ad-noise.

It's a matter of google-fu.... what aspect of owning or using or selling a pickaxe do you really want to find? There are so many overloads on the term, you have to disambiguate it before anyone can help you find what you seek.

Try finding anything about how to properly add mark up a an existing page of hypertext, you'll never find the term, because HTML has overloaded it too many times, you have to eventually learn the magic synonym "annotation", and you can find it pretty easy.

If you were to use the word "adze" instead of pickaxe, you might have far better luck finding what you seek.

Don't assume that because a site has advertising, its content is of no value.

There isn't likely to be a treasure trove of interesting "non-commercial" content about pickaxes being hidden from you by Google - what you listed seems like a reasonable set of general results for a general search. Most people searching for pickaxes, or discussing them online, will either want to purchase one or be referring to Minecraft.

If you want less generic results, make more specific searches. Or keep looking beyond the fifth page of results.

Search harder, longer, and deeper.

https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=pickaxe

Try Teclis (search engine for non-commercial content)

http://teclis.com

There are quite many good alternatives to Google and having them in your tool belt will help you to find lots of interesting sources.

Some ideas where to look – some of these are methods that I use myself quite frequently:

• Reddit’s search function – even more useful if you know a good subreddit relevant to the topic at hand. Subreddits are easy to find if you google for ⟬topic subreddit⟭

• Google Books. Lots of high-quality material there.

• Archives of digitized newspapers. Lots of high-quality material there as well. Which archive to use depends on your language and locale. Here’s one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28140621

• Internet Archive. Their collections include many good scanned books, technical manuals, etc. ⟬site:archive.org *keyword⟭ works well.

• Twitter’s search function can sometimes yield links to good articles, blog posts etc. It depends on the topic, but there are lots of nerds on Twitter discussing the topics close to their hearts.

• Old–school web forums. Those still exists and many of them are searchable. (Can’t think of any specific forums that are in English, but there ought to be some good ones still out there.)

• “Trade rags” (i.e. a newspaper or other publication that covers a particular industry). Many of those are not paywalled. Can possibly be found by using the methods listed above.

Best of luck!

I've been using Neeva (https://neeva.com/) instead of Google lately. I think the results are comparably good and way less commercial.

https://millionshort.com/

I searched pick axe there and it seems even more commericalized

Seems so.

I've only ever heard them referred to as picks, know you, as in pick and shovel.

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