this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Research journals along with a university based Library search engine to find them.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

If I want a useful ad, I just wait on instagram to spy on me and actually give me good local ads that are useful

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

And everyone gave me shit for keeping my feedly account.

The Reader died, but the feeds do live on, between mastodon, lemmy and feedly I got plenty to read.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Have good filters for all the crap and use search engines with modifiers. What’s a subject or thing you’ve struggled to research so I can see if I have the same issue?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Phrasing and content are quite different, even if the points end up being the almost the same.

This post "feels" a great deal more relatable, I don't think AI applies, or at least, I'm not familiar with the issue you are outlining.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I used to frequent searchlores.org and fravia.com back in the day, they were a treasure trove of specialised web search and data mining techniques.

UNSW maintain a mirror of the old websites, last updated 14 years ago, worth a look if you have some time on your hands.

http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Brave search seems marginally better than others.

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