Changing times and a forgetful youth have forced me to write this guide.
I am increasingly disturbed by the amount of people I meet (young and old) that navigate their lives at least in part online, but are unable to use the internet for it's intended purpose: finding infomation. Writing to someone or posting a picture of your cat seems to be second nature for most people, but converting a picture from a PDF or looking up a study (or even a word!) you saw in an article is something else entirely.
For the most part, it is not anyone's fault or laziness. It's the fault of what the internet has become. For one, there's just so much more stuff now; it's hard to know exactly where to start and who to trust. And so much of that stuff is now garbage, either in the way it's presented--with disruptive ads that don't close correctly--or in the way it's written--vague, misleading, or straight incorrect. But for seconds: no one really teaches you how to use this thing do they? There are no courses on "How to use a search engine" or "How to find good posts on a forum," yet these are the kinds of skills you really need if you want to navigate the modern world without getting constantly distracted, misled, or totally lost.
There are of course, countless guides on "netiquette" geared towards every possible internet subculture you can find. While many of them have influenced this document and give many helpful tips on writing good informative posts, none of them really go over what I think is most important: what to do with the information you're reading.
This will probably be an evolving document as new services and websites become available (or go down), but much of this material in the beginning should be pretty generally applicable no matter what services are available.
As for which search engine to use: you should use all of them, until you get the results you need. In my experience, none of the major search engines are particularly good and I get inconsistent searches on all of them depending on what I'm searching. There is much preaching these days about privacy concerns, but to be honest I don't believe any service is more "private" than another. These are all privacy nightmares, your best bet is to just search often and as varied as you can.
A common complaint lodged at me whenever I recommend Wikipedia is that it's not a source of truth since they found X mistake somewhere, or made Y edit when they were a teenager that's still there. No one has ever (or should ever) claim Wikipedia is reliable. Frankly, you should not consider any source to be reliable, but that's a separate issue. If you know how to use Wikipedia you can use it to get closer to a true understanding of whatever you're studying.
For starters, as a general rule, you should not trust anything you read on a topic that is less than 20 years old. We're still living through the history at this point and new things can come to light.
Many in the advertising world will boast about using a VPN for anonymity, or using a VPN in conjuction with Tor to "increase privacy." This is simply a misunderstanding of terms. A VPN provides privacy of the user's connection since it provides encryption--only the VPN provider can "see" what is searched. The goal of Tor is anonymity not privacy. Anonymity means "no one knows who you are" not "no one knows what you're doing." Technically, traffic is encrypted between nodes of the Tor service, so some level of privacy is provided as well, but this is most effective when using hidden services, not using Tor in general.