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?
I use Kagi and it’s just amazing. Don’t have any problems. You can also configure Kagi to prioritize certain sites and remove others you don’t care about. Very happy with it.
The bullshit is because Google wants you to visit shitty sites because of ad revenues.
Throw them out of your life.
For how much I use search on a daily basis though, paying per search is a little too pricey
This is the way. Kagi has been worth the price of admission.
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.
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.
Keep a log of anything you do successfully find that you may need later.
I’ve started bookmarking anything I do find genuinely useful as there’s a chance that the a similar search would yield different results that wouldn’t help at all.
I’ve also installed archivebox on one of my home lab pcs to grab a snapshot of any sites and pages that I want to keep (you never know if you’ll go back and it’s gone).
Retaining good information for yourself is just as important on the web now given all the bot spam and affiliate laden shit out there that Google and Bing seem to be promoting these days.
Kinda glad that I kept most of my university textbooks and have a bunch of encyclopaedias and shit lying around.
I just search ddg and get my results. I don’t get those affiliates, top 10 lists, or whatever you’re talking about. I just get good results, and if I don’t then I try using Google.
Another tip that basically works with all search engines. Mark a word in “quotes” to have results require that word in the page. Helps you narrow results down if you need something specific.
I do the same thing: duckduckgo for general search, Google for somewhat obscure stuff if ddg didn’t get me the results I was looking for (say, information on a specific error from a specific software programming framework).
Also you can put entire sentences in between quotes to search for that whole sentence, which is especially usefull for the above mentioned errors in specific software programming frameworks (as you can put the whole error message in between quotes to get matches on the error message itself not combinations of the words in it) and for things like expressions (say “high-side switch”) when you don’t really want as results everything which contains the individual words.
Mind you, if it gets few results with quotes Google will search without quotes so just force it to search only with quotes (you get a link on the top of the first results page for that).
I was actually surprised people kept saying they kept getting bad search results and only now because you mentioned quotes did I notice that I just search using quotes almost all of the time and have been doing so for years, so that’s probably why I get mainly decent results even from Google (though DDG is better for general search imho)
you will almost get nothing for most of the phrases in quotes
Brave search seems marginally better than others.
I have found some pretty neat information here on Lemmy, specifically talking about Android, Firefox and Linux.
I started paying for a search engine called Kagi. Google and the other free search engines are completely fucking worthless these days.
The internet used to be about people sharing what they know for free to help others and it became a WINNER TAKE ALL kind of internet. There are no blog, article, reviews, that are not fake anymore, you can buy each one of these services, even search results can be bought. Google, Duckduckgo, Bing, Kagi, are all the same shit different smell, the results are not relevant anymore, the only thing that makes them different is the browser extension you run to block the spyware, tracking, and surveillance on your every click, data that gets sold by your ISP, Social media, and every site you visit, not unless you are blocking that info between your browser and the site you visit - which is doable with a lot of browser extensions.
I use SearXNG to search for things, with custom redirects and block lists.
If I want a genuine human opinion on a topic, I add “site:reddit.com” to the search. Hopefully someday there will be a good way to parse the fediverse for info.
For products I’ll immediately start with Project Farm on YouTube and see if he’s covered the thing I’m interested in. If he hasn’t I’ll try /r/buyitforlife. I’ll look on multiple sites of retailers I’ve heard of for reviews of products from a manufacturer I’ve heard of (no “WEEJIANGBEST” on Amazon) and give conditional trust to ratings averaged from 3000 or more individual reviews. If I’m feeling wildly thorough I might visit Fakespot to vet those reviews. If the product is expensive, I might pay for a month of access to Consumer Reports. If it’s really expensive, I will pay for Consumer Reports.
For services, those are local to me, so I tend to rely on fuzzy word-of-mouth stuff. I might look in the subreddit for my city, but tend more toward simply knowing the reputation of what’s around me.
Edit: for local businesses, I also look them up on the Better Business Bureau.
UK version of Consumer Reports is which.co.uk
If you’re buying appliances etc it’s well worth the money
I use Kagi.com as a search engine.
This. It costs money, but on the other hand it is FAST, looks good and ad-free. You also have the ability to block spammy domains so they just don’t show up in results.
You get what you pay for. I would rather pay than deal with ads and poor quality results that are referral schemes, misinformation, ai generated content, etc.
Interesting, was the timing and community chosen for this query better than mine a couple days ago? Regardless, this post provides me more responses to a similar question to sort through, so no complaints here!
Use your critical thinking while reading to differentiate between scientifically sound claims and nonscientific marketing paroles.
It only works at the low level and for the really brainless stuff.
There are a lot of things which beyond a certain level require domain specific expertise to spot the bullshit.
One of the first things the genuine skeptic figures out is the limits of one’s own capability to evaluate information.
You can use some heuristics to try and spot greedy/marketing bollocks even in domains you don’t understand in depth (for example: cui bono - if those pushing a message benefit from it instantly goes into the “untrusted” mental bucket) but even that only goes so far (it’s not by chance that, for example, in politics and economics most Think Tanks hide their sources of funding: it hides the direct link between “studies” they publish and benefiting those who fund them).
In summary, try but beware that we’re all limited and as smart as one is there are plenty of equally smart people who make money from swindling others.
I’ve switched over to a paid search engine, kagi.com. There are no ads and the results are better than DDG.
Ridiculous pricing (unless you pick the Ultimate plan for 25 bucks a month you pay per individual searches), the “Why do we need an account” link leads to 404 and “example searches” that totally aren’t curated.
Yeah, I’m gonna pass. DDG is great anyway. The only times it doesn’t really find what I want, Google doesn’t find shit either.
If you’re not paying for it, you are not the customer, but the product. You most likely fit into the $5 or $10 plan. Here’s the page you’re looking for: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
If you’re not paying for it, you are not the customer, but the product.
While that’s generally a good way of thinking to stay alert, it’s not a dogma. It discredits the whole, vast FOSS ecosystem, most prominently the Linux kernel, or services like Wikipedia that don’t sell your data and rely solely on community contributions and donations.
DDG finances itself via non-personalized ads that aren’t very annoying. They won’t become a trillion dollar company that way but can get by.
Fair. By similar logic, don’t discredit the whole paid ecosystem, when you’re used to getting something for free. Kagi has no ads, no trackers, and listens to their users. Their search results and feature set is better than DDG.
don’t discredit the whole paid ecosystem
You know that I didn’t. I explained why I’m not interested in their service, so why do you try to convince me so hard? Do you get provisions or something?
