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 Google, Yandex, Reddit, Lemmy, and Chat GPT
I go on 4chan and insult the product/thing/person that I need info on. Then I wait, rubbing my uhhh hands like a perv behind the tree.
I guess rule 7 (Anon is still able to deliver) applies here
4chan has proven surprisingly useful as of late. A hell of a lot more than reddit and Google.
I would give you lemmy gold for this comment if it existed…
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.
I use www.presearch.com
Don’t stick to one channel. Don’t get your news from social media, because social media is an echo chamber.
Use an RSS feed aggregator app to consolidate boring news articles from multiple boring publications. This will give you an even spread.
You will see the same news stories from different news outlets with different spin. You will quickly come to understand various news publishers biases and how extreme they are.
Always go into an article with an understanding of the publishers biases that might be at play.
If you must do the news on social thing… Only use social to discuss stories you already understand to some degree. Or as a place to research the news topic deeper.
For the most part, just use social to hang with your communities… you know… like a social network :)
You can also check out ground.news for the same bias-check aggregator thing.
I use ImproveTheNews.org for this.
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Uh yeah but also I think I get a chance to get out and buy one yet or not to bad people I know you are going to be a little more than I do you know.
What do you recommend for an RSS app?
QuiteRSS
NewsBlur is great.
iOS & MacOS recommendation Free: NetNewsWire Paid: Reeder 5 (one time payment)
Search for open source rss feed readers. There are a few good ones.
Inoreader RSS app for Android.
I’ve been using Nunti (FOSS, Android only) for a few months now. I love it’s adaptive learning feature which does a good job of filtering articles that I don’t care about.
Do you happen to know how long it may take the “adaptive learning” feature to kick in? I gather it may take some extended usage, however if that feature does seem to work I may have to reconsider Nunti, as I was initially put off by the absence of some other features when last I looked at it.
You can access it after you like/dislike 50 articles
Thanks! I must’ve missed or forgot that since I only briefly looked into it (and looking with a different feature in mind).
I’ve been using FocusReader on Android.
I’ve just recently found iOS app “feeeed”
Inoreader
I use NetNewsWire (on iOS) and swear by it. Super simple and easy to use.
The developer has an intensely focused vision for simplicity that I love and think is pretty wise too.
I could use android and desktop Linux recomendations too
Definitely. You’d love Allsides.com btw. Gives great info on how a topic is covered across the spectrum and summarizes them really well. There’s an RSS feed for it too.
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
I’m a phd student so I’ll just stick with my university library databases.
Until Google kills it
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/
They are also removing features like downvote count and raising prices. Fuck google and YouTube.
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
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.
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.
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
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 .
I started paying for a search engine called Kagi. Google and the other free search engines are completely fucking worthless these days.
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.
Try to search for something that has been in the News. Even if that news article is NOT what you want… It’s going to be the only thing offered . Over and over and over.
Sadly, most of the news articles from “trusted” sources, are put there to steer the dialogue in a specific way. You can’t talk about certain things in the news and some articles are specifically put out there to raise awareness of certain products. Read Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent for more info.
Usually with the exact same wording, too.
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.
