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In running uwusearch and just websurfing in general, I’ve picked up some tricks over the years, so here
I'm going to talk a bit about some of them.
First, backlink checkers. They're extremely useful, because
if you have a few websites you like/love, you can find places where other people are linking to them, often
in lists of other really cool websites. Links pages in general, however you find them, are extremely useful for finding websites. Directories of course too.
With search engines, take advantage of excluding terms, date filtering, special keywords, etc. Filtering is extremely powerful, and I often pull up a handful of websites whose vibe I'm roughly looking for to see what words they use. Filtering websites for only websites that use certain informal terms/slang ('hey', 'yeah', 'uwu') can also help get you to more personal websites. Conversely, pull up the kinds of websites you want to filter to look if there's any terms mostly they would use (ex. of mine: 'ideology' when finding trans resources).
Some terms / phrases that are interesting to play with filtering in or out: "I love", "beautiful", "made me smile", "happy", "or", "and", words that are words in toki pona (like really common/basic ones); picking out relevant words to a subject and playing with filtering in/out some of them can be useful, and
onelook's "words that often appear near" and other sections that appear when you search a term can be helpful for this.
Note to self: mention tlds, and not just like the basic ones
This is perhaps obvious, but with search engines, trying out different synonyms or similar words. For example; yuri, sapphic romance, GL, girls love and lesbian romance all turn up different websites in different places.
Consider keeping a list of different things you want to find, no matter how impractical. I do this, and sometimes when websurfing, I come up with a different way to look for it, or come across some new resource for finding websites.
Maybe these things don't exist, but there's a *lot* on the internet, so possibly they do.
Some examples of things I have or have had on my list:
• "Wikipedia of links/websites, like a wiki about websites and which link to which and different methods for studying the internet"
• "Comprehensive visual food ingredient spoilage checker"
• "Driving in car at night ASMR" (I found this one ^^)
Again perhaps obvious, but if you want to see marginalized groups talk about their experiences, as mainstream
discussions are often flooded with people not in those groups talking about their (often very rough or wrong) conceptions of those people's experiences, the peripheral web is a good place to do that.
If you know multiple languages (or even if you can just sorta get the gist of a language you don't know), websurfing on websites in that language can help turn up completely different things.
If you find something cool, delete the subdomain from the URL to see if there's other cool things on that
website.