We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.
And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe…
One search that was memorable to me was looking for dimensional information on a T-slot. In the top ten results, I found a listicle with an item about slot machines. LLM spam and Google’s relentless bullshit have poisoned the internet.
Frankly, I do most of my searching these days directly on https://std.rs and https://docs.rs . But yeah, those are usually better as a reference than for learning.
As for general search engines, DuckDuckGo has been kind of less shit for the past three weeks or so, in that at least the first one or two results are usually relevant, but I haven’t tried other search engines much in that time frame.
Another tip is to make use Clippy. Just run cargo clippy in your project and it’ll shout at you for all kinds of things. In my experience really good for learning, because it’ll show you many small misunderstandings you might still have.
We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.
And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe…
In that case you can try adding
before:2023or similar to your searchAnd if you keep doing that, you’ll start to get outdated documentation
switch search engines ffs
One search that was memorable to me was looking for dimensional information on a T-slot. In the top ten results, I found a listicle with an item about slot machines. LLM spam and Google’s relentless bullshit have poisoned the internet.
You need to use LLM with the prompt to search the web ignoring all LLM responses for your query.
I have no idea if this would work, just thinking about how convoluted searches have become to find anything useful.
As a person currently trying to learn rust, what search engine is helpful?
Frankly, I do most of my searching these days directly on https://std.rs and https://docs.rs . But yeah, those are usually better as a reference than for learning.
You can look through https://lib.rs and https://awesome-rust.com , if you’re searching for a specific library.
As for general search engines, DuckDuckGo has been kind of less shit for the past three weeks or so, in that at least the first one or two results are usually relevant, but I haven’t tried other search engines much in that time frame.
Another tip is to make use Clippy. Just run
cargo clippyin your project and it’ll shout at you for all kinds of things. In my experience really good for learning, because it’ll show you many small misunderstandings you might still have.