2026-07-16 15:50 UTC
Me and a bunch of friends are going to do a "search engine-free day" tomorrow!
On that day, visiting Wikipedia, MDN or StackOverflow directly and using their search feature would be permitted, but we'll try not to use general-purpose search engines (and no LLMs).
I'm curious how this will break my habits; where I'll miss search engines most, and which other ways of finding information we'll discover.
I'm sharing this so that if this resonates with you, you can join! =)
Replies (3)
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@blinry@chaos.social 2026-07-16 15:55
This is also motivated by search engines seeming to become worse these days… For some questions, it's maybe nicer to just ask a friend who might know the answer? Or to follow a trace of hyperlinks through the web from someone's website! That way, we might remember the answer better, as well. I'll set up https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng/ on my laptop to block search engines, and configure my Android phone to use a bogus search engine by default. And download some programming language documentation.
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@GustavinoBevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org 2026-07-16 15:54
@blinry@chaos.social This is exactly what I do every day.
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@wlana@ohai.social 2026-07-16 16:40
@blinry@chaos.social call me if you need a phone joker