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?
There’s a lot of competition and a big overload of data. That makes searching for stuff really hard. Don’t know the solution…
Just use a chatbot, it works like a charm. I personally use bing chat’s api to get good information.
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.
deleted by creator
UK version of Consumer Reports is which.co.uk
If you’re buying appliances etc it’s well worth the money
We’re gonna put that to the test!
I follow some reviewers on YouTube, Project Farm is a great one.
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.
Right, by the 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?
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 😉
Feel free to scammed by an account based search engine that won’t even work in private browsing
I do better via DuckDuckGo than Google these days.
Even that sucks a lot of the time. Everything is superficial in scope, so it finds the same bland drivel as every other search engine. It just doesn’t have ads clogging it up.
DDG and Google both suck, but in different ways. Same is true for all other search engines I tried (Bing, Ecosia, Brave Search, Startpage). All of them have their own major downsides. For example Brave is pretty cool but is terrible at non-English search results.
Overall I still find Google the most consistent, despite all its faults.
Brave is pretty cool
It sucks that the owner is a shitbag
I have found some pretty neat information here on Lemmy, specifically talking about Android, Firefox and Linux.
We have stuff that is not Linux, too.
I don’t know where we keep any of that, but I’m like 80% sure we have it somewhere.
Haha I felt this comment.
I seen someone suggest Lemmy’s porn is better then Voldemort’s website now. I was like, lemmy has porn?
I think once topics have labeles with multiple similar instances or something to that effect it’ll get much more organized and hopefully factual as a result. The propaganda is thick on lemmy.
Edit: spelling
Dude, you had me seriously wondering what kind of Voldemort porn exists out there… I understood the reference… Too late.
Kinda glad that I kept most of my university textbooks and have a bunch of encyclopaedias and shit lying around.
University textbooks? Encyclopedias? You should try scholar.google.com
Until Google kills it
I’m a phd student so I’ll just stick with my university library databases.
I know! Five years ago, I got so much shit for keeping print encyclopedias and other reference material. “It’s all on the Internet,” they said.
The joke is on them: the Internet is run by humans and humans are idiots.
I’ve got some bad news for you about who the beings are that wrote those encyclopedias.
If it’s written down AND printed out it is correct.
How to verify? I just printed the above comment. Printers have an objectivity-gizmo that disallows the printing of anything incorrect, y’know!
I lived through 2 weeks without power once after a storm. Made me realise how valuable physical information/ entertainment is.
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 would agree. And I love those videos with timestamps.
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.
Anything notorios for hype, has its hype based marketing shills that drown out the real information and honest voices. Excelant example is anything involving sex
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
They are also removing features like downvote count and raising prices. Fuck google and YouTube.
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.
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.
Every site wants traffic, and I’ve been guilty of gaming search results myself in the past, but also don’t forget the other big conflict here:
Google wants ad revenue.
As such, if you are small and do it honestly, you have very little chance of getting any actual traffic your way because Google sends everyone to the “big end of town” and search engines / internet marketing has become a pay to win platform.
Back links made sense when we were all linking to each other early on because it was how you found good content, but nobody is linking to anyone anymore - unless it’s for some return to the linker, such as making a high traffic blog post with affiliate links etc - and it’s time to come up with another method.
Right now most effective for me to get information / reviews is add “Reddit” to the search and you get a discussion of the pros and cons. I’ve been using chatgpt for a surprising amount of “I just need to know this general info” kind of stuff. Ie I used chatgpt to work out the temperature and time it would take to dehydrate lemons in the oven, and also how to clean said oven with what I had on hand. Both of these would have been much more time consuming to do the traditional way, and I would have been bombarded with ads and people’s life stories before they get to the “just use vinegar” part
Trying to rig the cards using book titles.
First you get a ton of books whose name starts with “AAA” and a whole race-of-ever-more-As.
Eventually they figure out people are actually searching for other letters so you get the same in other letters: BBB…, RRR…, III… and so on.
Then people start jumping over that big fat bulk of titles which start with just the one letters repeated tons of times in the first cards of any letter, so they start misusing the most common and searched for words, for example a book about digital coins with a title that starts with the word “Cooking”.
And so on.
Doesn’t it sound strangelly familiar (maybe not the explicit techniques but the “slimy arms race” aspect)?!
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.
You’re not wrong, but if searches quit being useful, people will quit using them.
That’s accurate and doesn’t contradict the person you replied to. What they are saying is that SEO was never about fixing a search engine user’s problem; it exists to solve web host’s problem of “we aren’t getting enough ad revenue.”
The same is going to happen with these LLMs once they rely more and more on searching the web: folks are going to find out how to poison the results in a way that pushes users toward their products/services/ads.
SEO should always have been called index poisoning, because that’s exactly what it is.
You’re right. I was thinking SEO was action taking by the search engines, not actions a web site is taking to move up in the search results.
I started paying for a search engine called Kagi. Google and the other free search engines are completely fucking worthless these days.
This is exactly the reason I’ve been considering if it’s possibly the time to start and launch a brand new search engine, especially now subscription based systems are so common.
With at the core a pledge to not record and/or share any user data or interaction and supported by a subscription service for who wants to pay and really oldschool tier selfhosted “sidebar” ads for the rest.
None of this “insert ads into content” shite.
For the algo, also far more oldschool “less intelligent”, where keywords and content matter (backed by a curation of good/bad sites) and options for users to report sites, that will then be re-curated.
For adding sites, allow subscribers to suggest sites that then get listed to other subscribers (or if it grows large enough to support employees, subscribers AND employees) for validation.
If a site is then later found to be questionable, everyone that suggested and validated it can get a negative validation score, which will be used for future reference when selecting users to validate new sites.
Something like they get +1 for every validation they do.
But -1 for 1 bad validation, -11 for 2, -31 for 3, -61 for 4, -101 for 5, etc, so if they validate 100 sites and validate 5 incorrectly, they are no longer allowed to validate new sites.
And for validation, once there are enough subscribers, you take 100+ random subscribers, of which 50% needs to respond to validate and if 90% of responders validate positively, it passes. If less than 90% validate positively, it goes for manual review by the administration.
Etc etc.
The problem with search engines isn’t the search engines themselves. The problem is that sites game the system. Everybody want to be at the top of the search results, so they do whatever it takes to get there.
You can start a brand new search engine, but if it get popular enough it will also be gamed to the point it’s useless again.
There just needs to be actually human eyes on this kind of shit. Especially if it’s a subscription service like dude was saying. Algorithms will get gamed. Everything will get gamed. But a gamer can spot another gaming faster than anything I know of. You need a bullshitter to call ballshit on any and every letter-not-the-spirit of the rule, bad faith motherfucker out there. Ban hammer vigilance almost always wins out, and besides a person’s data can be cross referenced to pings in cell towers. A crafty bot (maybe not entirely leeeeegal) can auto block from IPs around marked IMEIs, so wherever bitchass goes, if he’s got his phone, no go.
And if you wanted too, by the time they got wise and got a new number, you’d already know their habits and have deduced the number switch anyway. People are amazingly, and frighteningly easy to identify by just a few repeated locations in a week.
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!
That is an amazing list of helpful extensions, THANK YOU!
Saving this comment. Thanks!
Well damn. Thank you. Saving this! I have Ublock origin already. I’m excited about the other suggestions too!
Pinterest is half the fucking google image search. Bye! And the other half is shopping ads. Google can kiss my grits.
Use alternative front-end ends of the popular sites such as youtube , Twitter, medium , Google,etc you use to get a privacy enhanced, ad free, clutter free experience.
https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends
There’s apps that can automatically redirect you to these alternative whenever you encounter their counterpart.
That looks cool! Saved. What apps could do the redirect? Would that be possible with an extension? That would be awesome.
That libredirect plugin is awesome! Just tried it quickly on Quora and that works.
I wish kbin had a save feature; I’m replying so I can find this later 😆
On lemmy, you can click on the little … at the bottom of the post and save bookmarks of posts and replies :)
I like Ghostery too. It blocks cookies and trackers so I can just search for something without being bombarded by ads for it later.
Should also be said that for various edge cases where a extension doesn’t exist, uBlock’s element selector function lets you get very granular with filtering things. If you know a bit of html/css, you can get creative with it and consistently hide just about any element you like across many different sites.
For example, recently I’ve been on a quest to de-rating all my favorite media sites and Google results, etc. No more wayward rotten tomatoes, metacritic, or imbd scores when I want to look up info on media unless I go looking for them on those websites. No addon that I’m aware of exists solely for this purpose, so I’m basically using uBlock to do it by using the element selector any time I see them. Some sites make this tricky, and any adjustment to the design of the page could break it, but the joy I get from being able to curate my web experience to exactly what I want to it to be can’t be understated.
Using uBlock to block-element to block a prompt asking me to disable my ad blocker is one of the best feelings ever.
There’s a list for that I believe
Thanks! Was looking for useful extensions. Saved!
Neo: What are you trying to tell me? I should ignore ad content?
Morpheus: No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.
