Good article. I get a lot of interesting information from following a small number of technical blogs of people I know (usually just through years of email contact) and trust. That is how I get valuable/interesting things to read. (I also use twitter for this purpose.)

Redit (hint: strong customize the 'My Redit' lists you subscribe to narrow things down to your particular interests) and Hacker News are also pretty good if you stick to the first few pages of up-voted links.

re: search engines: one of my primary uses for web search is pasting in error messages from server build errors, runtime errors, etc. Also, for quickly looking up an API I can't quite remember. A very different process than using search to find fun stuff to read.