It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
It is so ironic that SEO has become the very problem it was invented to fix: all these jokers gaming the system have all but plunged us all back into prehistoric internet times, before search engines appeared and people had to remember which specific sites to go to find information online.
SEO solved the problem it was meant to fix, i.e. “users arent looking at our site enough.” You’re fooling yourself if you think it was ever about making searches more useful for the user.
The very conceit of SEO defeats the purpose of a search. The idea is the search combs through sites, finds what the user wants, and returns it to them based on what it believes is the closest match to what the user wanted. It’s a process between two parties: the user and the search engine. The second the websites start trying to inject themselves into this process by adjusting their content to the search, it corrupts the process.
Picture yourself in a library looking through the card catalog. You’re searching for something, using a system to locate it. Imagine if the books you’re looking for spontaneously changed their titles or authorship just to “help you find them” while you’re flipping through cards. Imagine if you’re walking down the shelves and books are literally shifting around like fucking Hogwarts, trying to get in front of you.
That is the inherent issue with SEO. No one but the user knows what the user wants to see, the content trying to adjust itself to appear in the results more consistently isn’t about helping the user find what they want, it’s about making sure the user sees that specific content.
Because every website wants traffic. That’s all it is.
The problem is that monied interests want to control the spin on information, just as General Electric was able to strictly govern television news during the cold war, and the George W. Bush administration and the military industrial complex wanted to control the newspapers and news sites during the war on terror (and game reviews occasionally gave below 7.0 out of 10)
Truth leaks to the people though novel means of communication, sadly with all the rumors. And any time a fact-checking service develops a reputation for veracity, it’s going to face pressure to close, such as Snopes; or pressure to adhere to company marketing guidelines such as Wikipedia, for whom Kelloggs Company and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints both have a marketing subdepartment devoted to assuring no controversies or elaborations will stay on their respective Wikipedia pages without a generous dollop of hagiography.
So yes, figuring out the real deal is still an art form like processing data to get intel. For old stuff (e.g. Brigham Young’s randy exploits seducing young girls with religious mandates) we look for the theses that point to primary sources. But for new stuff, we cross-examine multiple news reports for the consistent facts, and avoid interpretation.
As for product information, yes it’s often to find out important stuff like how secure your IoT appliance is. You can assume it’s not unless they can specify how they made it so without buzzwords.
There’s an interesting blog post on this subject (likely someone posted it already): https://dkb.blog/p/google-search-is-dying
I find it to be very agreeable. Search is dying and I don’t agree that appending “site:reddit.com” is any kind of permanent solution, just a workaround that will also break.
There’s a lot of competition and a big overload of data. That makes searching for stuff really hard. Don’t know the solution…
Quora (https://www.quora.com) is marketed as “A place to share knowledge and better understand the world”… You can ask questions and get them answered by experts, or you can find questions already answered by experts…
I follow some reviewers on YouTube, Project Farm is a great one.
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I’m just trying asking multiple people who seem to be knowledgeable on the topic to see if I can get people to volunteer their recommendations.
On programming topics, your top search results will be stack overflow followed github followed by sites that scrape stack overflow and then the sites that scrape github. It’s great.
I’ve switched over to a paid search engine, kagi.com. There are no ads and the results are better than DDG.
Paying for a search engine is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard lol. DDG is just better and I question what you use to guage better results, especially since you already spent money and are already susceptible to bias.
If you’re not paying for it, you are the product. Don’t knock it til you try it.
That’s a very black and white view of the world and is not true.
What, to try things before you dismiss them as dumb?
I have a super secret search engine that reads your mind for only $20/mo. You wanna try?
Sure, if there’s a free trial (Kagi has one). Though if it’s from you, probably not 😉
Stick to sites you know. If you’re looking for a review and you get a hit on a site you don’t know there’s a better than 50% chance it’s just an ad generated site (and frequently these days just the output from chatgpt).
Sucks for lesser known sites that are trying to get noticed, but unless google work out a way of removing the crap from feeds that’s the way it is.
Same with youtube… unless you trust the reviewer, assume it’s paid unless there’s good evidence otherwise.
Search for reddit/lemmy mentions specifically… although those can be astroturfed too… but the comments are generally helpful.
I use www.presearch.com
people are gave some good answers.
it boils down to various large sites.
wikipedia(app) and reddit(app) are my top.
often time i just bang out a search and pinpoint the answer and trash the rest.
[deleted] stackexchanges and ycomb are some other popular sites.
quora used to seem attractive but information is questionable and the whole experience is trash.gemini,bookmarks,chatgpt are some others. also libgen .
Lemmings are going to crucify me for this, but here goes anyway…
site:www.reddit.com
Perfectly understandable imo. Reddit has been around for ages and has a huge backlog of information that users aggregated. Can’t really expect Lemmy to match that after only (somewhat) taking off not that long ago. And i won’t fault anyone for using this accumulated knowledge, i can’t quite avoid it myself.
For me the big question is where people contribute new things. And considering how reddit is behaving, Lemmy/the Fediverse is the far better place to do so.
Honestly, niche YouTube channels. The problem is sometimes you don’t want to sit through a 30-45 minute video to find the information you’re after.
I haven’t found Google useful as a search engine for years and now Youtube is squeezing creators and pushing so many ads it will become unusable for me once the anti-ad-blocker policy is fully implemented. Paying for Youtube premium isn’t the answer either, it will cost as much as Amazon Prime just to watch YT videos, then the price will continue to rise after we subscribe to the service.
We must remember that Alphabet Inc, the parent company of these services is an essentially an advertising company that also sells the data they collect about us to virtually anyone, including police in right-wing states looking to arrest abortion seekers.
https://telegra.ph/How-Big-Tech-Revenue-and-Profit-Breaks-Down-by-Company-12-09
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-anti-adblocking-feature-3354930/
Worth noting my youtube premium subscription price hasn’t changed since I signed up in 2017.
If I cancel this deal I have and go to sign up again, or change to a family plan then the price goes up.
I’m not sure if this is the norm, or a special part of the deal I got but just a bit of extra info
I would agree, you can still find unbiased stuff on YouTube, though depending how popular the thing you’re looking up is, you might also have to go through a bunch of sell-outs first.
Also the only thing I still go to the Rxx website for.
