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?

  • TechCodex@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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…

  • leanleft@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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 .

  • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Extensions help a ton. Some of my favorites:

    Block or Highlight Search Engine Results - Does what the name says. When you run a search on Google or DDG or whatever engine you use, and you get a result from a shit website, add it to the filter and you’ll never see that trash again. I filter out the following trash: chegg, timesmojo, coursehero, numerade, forbes, instagram, and pinterest. I’ve only been using this one for a little bit, so I expect that list will grow a LOT, but even with just those removed from my search results, HOLY HELL has the quality of my searches has increased. This one is probably the most relevant to OP’s question.

    Dictionary Anywhere - For vocab. Double-click any word on the web, and a little text bubble pops up with its definition - works on words in that bubble too, for when you run into shit like “Redundancy: the state of being redundant.” -_- double click the “redundant” in the bubble to get a second bubble with a more useful definition. (doesn’t happen often, but it’s a cool feature, so worth calling out)

    Fandom Enhance - For videogames, since every game wiki is on Fandom for some reason. This extension scrubs a LOT of the unnecessary clutter from the page.

    Recipe Filter - Works with recipe websites. Scrubs out the 528 page life story from the author and reduces it down to just “Grilled cheese: bread, cheese, butter. Put butter on two pieces of bread. Put a slice of cheese in between. Put it on a griddle at 250 degrees for 2 mins. Flip it over, two more mins. Eat that sum’ bitch.” ✔

    Youtube-shorts block. Youtube shorts NEVER have good content - get that TikTok shit outa here.

    uBlock Origin - This one’s a HEAVY lifter for taking the trash out of the internet. This will improve both the quality of information on screen by removing a TON of sketchy shit, and make your browsing a lot safer by filtering out malicious links. If you’re not already using uBlock and take nothing else from this post, TAKE THIS ONE.

    …that’s pretty much it on my end, but there’s a lot of other useful extensions out there. If anyone else has one to add, by all means let’s keep this ball rolling!