I’ve often found it very difficult to find EA documents on a particular topic. I had an epiphany a couple of days ago when I realized that, well… you can just ask Google to do this for you. Since there may be other people who, like my previous self, have not yet realized this, I will explain here how it works. It is very simple: if you want, say, to learn about bees, you just type in the Google search bar something like[1]
The point is that you can specify a set of websites to restrict the search. On the example above the search is restricted to two websites, but more can be added, for instance:
The list of websites can of course be expanded further. I now have a long list of websites including those above which I copy-paste to the search bar each time I want to look for something in the EA sphere. All the other standard tools to optimize a Google search remain available, such as restricting the time range (using the “Tools” menu), imposing a file type (by writing, for instance, “filetype:pdf”), excluding a word (by preceding it with a minus sign), looking for images or videos only, etc.
Let me add to this that there are also very useful curated lists of EA documents sorted by topic at resources.eahub.org.
I think it would be really valuable if a website such as eahub.org included a search form which would do some version of this. (In my opinion, the list of included websites should be quite long by default, with an option that allows to restrict the search to a subset of websites chosen by the user.)
How to find EA documents on a particular topic
I’ve often found it very difficult to find EA documents on a particular topic. I had an epiphany a couple of days ago when I realized that, well… you can just ask Google to do this for you. Since there may be other people who, like my previous self, have not yet realized this, I will explain here how it works. It is very simple: if you want, say, to learn about bees, you just type in the Google search bar something like[1]
bees site:effectivealtruism.org OR site:80000hours.orgThe point is that you can specify a set of websites to restrict the search. On the example above the search is restricted to two websites, but more can be added, for instance:
bees site:effectivealtruism.org OR site:80000hours.org OR site:eaglobal.org OR site:openphilanthropy.org OR site:givewell.org OR site:animalcharityevaluators.org OR site:globalprioritiesinstitute.orgThe list of websites can of course be expanded further. I now have a long list of websites including those above which I copy-paste to the search bar each time I want to look for something in the EA sphere. All the other standard tools to optimize a Google search remain available, such as restricting the time range (using the “Tools” menu), imposing a file type (by writing, for instance, “filetype:pdf”), excluding a word (by preceding it with a minus sign), looking for images or videos only, etc.
Let me add to this that there are also very useful curated lists of EA documents sorted by topic at resources.eahub.org.
I think it would be really valuable if a website such as eahub.org included a search form which would do some version of this. (In my opinion, the list of included websites should be quite long by default, with an option that allows to restrict the search to a subset of websites chosen by the user.)
A direct link to this search query can be created like this.