That's how most of us geeks did it back in the day. I'm a community college drop-out with a partial psychology degree, and no formal IT education... but here I am, 15 years into a highly paid career as software developer and *nix systems architect. All it cost me was the price of a few O'Reilly books, hours of practice, and the balls to go for it in spite of no formal computer education. All the most talented geeks I've ever met are self-educated anyway. Having a computer science degree is almost a flag for a crappy geek who knows lots of buzzwords and maybe some theory but has no real world practical knowledge.

You can use https://www.google.com/ to make the ugliness go away without needing to sign in and set preferences. What the fuck drugs are they on at Google that they thought this abomination was a good idea?

Run a real OS like Linux, and this is much less of an issue. When you're not tied to commercial drivers, life is easier.

In their attempt to be "more serious" Wikipedia has lost a lot of what made it so fantastic in the beginning. Bullshido, or some obscure band, or whatever may not be something Encyclopaedia Britannica covers, but as long as the article is factual I think many of the things Wikipedia deletes really ought to be left in place. When it comes to things that are well known to non-English people but not known to many English speakers, the editors can be ridiculous at deleting things - even when there are well fleshed out articles in other language Wikipedias.