[pininja]

> Datasheets are law abiding documentation?

Ideally true, but in practice I’ve seen certain performance claims (such as battery cell capacity degradation in a battery data sheet) aren’t accurate or depend a lot on your application. If they are reputable, I assume they are trying to estimate an honest average.

Navigating the sites are challenging when I don’t already know which part I want, for sure. I wish there were better ways to explore sites for certain keywords in a data sheet.

[nitrogen]

Do search engines like Octopart or Digikey help?

[joshvm]

Digikey has one of the better search engines, not least because you get preview thumbnails of almost everything, and you can search in single unit quantities. It also has some intelligence when filtering parts by value (eg Leds by wavelength).

The problem is usually knowing the names of things, and eventually you learn what keywords to search for eg 2row 10way for a 2x5 connector. Everything is mostly standardised.

Octopart is best for finding stock, I wouldn't use it to locate a new part.

For finding new chips, like random sensors, the best way is to trawl the major IC websites (Ti, Max, etc) and see what pops up. You can still get samples from most of these places, and of quite expensive parts too.