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## Why?
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.
## How to use a web browser
## How to use a search engine
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.
## How to read and find scholarly articles
### How to use Wikipedia
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.
### How to find articles with Google Scholar
## Advanced Topics
### How to use tor to browse anonymously
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.
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