I quit search engines for three months.
If you were following me on my Mastodon (until I started taking a break from microblogging), you may remember that I quit using the crawler-type search engines (like Google, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Lycos, etc) at the beginning of the year… sort of an accidental New Year’s resolution, but more of an experiment in how my brain works.
(No, you pedants, this does not mean I didn’t “search” using the built-in search features of specific websites like Wikipedia/forums/blogs/etc… just keep reading to learn more.)
That’s no joke- I would guess a good 80% of my search terms pre-experiment were just me landing on Wikipedia, Reddit, or the forum for whatever project I was working on.
During the length of my experiment, I used Wikipedia as the default search engine for my browsers (mainly to catch habitual searches). It probably handled a third of my searches just fine, without incident.
As a (now former) sysadmin, my next go-to has been Arch Wiki– probably the best example of Linux documentation in the world. Even as a Debian user, Arch Wiki really can’t be beat.
