When wanting to look up a datasheet for a random part number I encounter in a circuit, say an AD9862, my first action is just to type it into google. For about half of the parts I encounter, particularly ones made by big respected brand names (like the Analog Devices example I used above) this gives me as a first hit the official manufacturer page and datasheet. Happy.
But about half of the time, especially with commodity/generic parts, say a 7812, the top hits are all these garbage sites like alldatasheet, getdatasheet, or datasheetcatalog dot com (I'm not typing out their URLs, since I don't want to further increase the pagerank of these junk websites). These websites are ugly, crammed to the brim with ads, with bad search capabilities, lots of SEO to get them highly ranked by google, but often with very little in the way of useful content.
Do you have a favorite way to find datasheets online, that sidesteps these middle-man ad-crammed sites? Is there a nice, user-curated perhaps, clean, low-ad-content database of datasheets out there somewhere?
Best Answer
The others have made great recommendations. I'll add one small google hack that I use a lot:
[part number] datasheet filetype:pdf
So let's say you're looking for the LM629 datasheet... you'll google
or maybe an 74LS04:
This has always worked well for me, since I know that the datasheets are going to be in the PDF format.