Wow that's really interesting. Something I do very often, for libraries, languages, APIs, even shopping is:

"look into the possibilities for X search the web, do thorough comparison. look on HackerNews both to gather sources and gauge sentiment in the comments"

this yields pretty good results IMO.

If I am using an API/library, I will also ask "is this approach idiomatic? what does the documentation say? look through at least 10 pages online"