Search engines have been dropping in quality significantly within the past decade, and especially within this past year. The noise to signal ratio has been frankly painful.

Can you please share some resources you use when trying to find answers to technical questions?

For example, STEM, academia, engineering, programming, etc.

  • invertedspear@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Lots of quoting for specific phrases. Instead of searching like I used to using what I feel are relevant key words:

    react table sortable

    I now have to search for something like

    “Best sortable table component for react”

    This will lead me to some bullshit listicle that will then give me at least a few items to review, then I take the best one and start typing the components name vs and seeing what auto completes after vs

    It’s all become a game and I hate it.

  • TheAgeOfSuperboredom@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Wikipedia is pretty good for computer sciency stuff. I’ll often use it as a reference for things like protocols or if I need a quick refresher for some algorithm.

  • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    For all of those topics, I use domain specific sites. So for research I’ll look at arxiv or one of the sites that make research freely available. For programming, I’ll search language mailing lists, documentation, and examples. Searching GitHub also isn’t a bad idea, but watch out for license issues.

    Be wary of using tools like got to summarize articles or outright answer questions. There’s no guarantee it will be correct, and if you don’t know the answer you won’t know it’s wrong.

  • HardlightCereal@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    For code I use chagpt for first pass questions. Then I try compiling it and see if gpt is telling the truth