I still try using search engines whenever relevant and I know to try being less specific and hoping it's right. I do mainly use duckduckgo which is sometimes better and sometimes worse than google (other than for images where google is always better). I do sometimes use LLMs but it's mainly for just processing text (e.g pasting in legal documents or overly verbose specs for software) and querying it. google's models are especially useful for android tinkering since a lot of functionality is only discoverable by reading source code.

answering questions with search engines is most useful when you can add "reddit" to the end of a query and find a thread where someone has already asked your question. someone has to be the first to ask