How do people find good information on the internet these days?
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?
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.
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)?!
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.
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!
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.
Libredirect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
Bonus : https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy
That libredirect plugin is awesome! Just tried it quickly on Quora and that works.
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
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 :)
You can always bookmark the direct link to this post :')
If you're on mobile I suggest using Pocket app to save interesting links, you can find the Android version here and iOS version here.
That is an amazing list of helpful extensions, THANK YOU!
Saving this comment. Thanks!
Thanks! Was looking for useful extensions. Saved!
Stick to sites you know. If you're looking for a review and you get a hit on a site you don't know there's a better than 50% chance it's just an ad generated site (and frequently these days just the output from chatgpt).
Sucks for lesser known sites that are trying to get noticed, but unless google work out a way of removing the crap from feeds that's the way it is.
Same with youtube.. unless you trust the reviewer, assume it's paid unless there's good evidence otherwise.
Search for reddit/lemmy mentions specifically.. although those can be astroturfed too.. but the comments are generally helpful.
You hit the nail on the head, mate!
In previous times, I used to follow certain sites more closely, but then life happened and I lost track of things and now several sites have closed and I don't know where to start.
For example, I used to dig GameSpy for game reviews, but it closed down. I rarely buy games these days, but I don't know what to read when I do and want to inform myself (I remember IGN, but I don't know if it's good). I can check out reviews on Steam, but they're short reviews.
Same deal goes for PC reviews or computer accessories. I don't know where to look: everything looks like an ad site. I remember PCmag.com but I don't know if itself is an ad site or what to compare it to, if I wanted to check a second opinion. Every YouTube video about technology feels like a sponsored ad, though some are legit
Edit: fixed grammar
For videogames specifically, I usually turn to these sources for reliable advice:
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
I like OpenCritic for game reviews now. It's a site that aggregates a lot of reviews into one site. If not there I always trust steam reviews of games.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer!!!
Games I tend to look for people playing it on twitch. You can't get much better than actually seeing a game in action to know if it's for you.
Thanks! Sorry for the late answer! I am still resisting watching Twitch for lack of time, but if that's a good source, I'll go for it!
To add to this, I suggest sorting the comments by controversial on Reddit for another take.
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 :)
What do you recommend for an RSS app?
I could use android and desktop Linux recomendations too
iOS & MacOS recommendation Free: NetNewsWire Paid: Reeder 5 (one time payment)
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.
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).
QuiteRSS
Inoreader
NewsBlur is great.
Search for open source rss feed readers. There are a few good ones.
I’ve just recently found iOS app “feeeed”
I've been using FocusReader on Android.
You can also check out ground.news for the same bias-check aggregator thing.
First story they show a picture of Yvan Attal (actor) when it is about what Gabriel Attal said (minister of education)
I use ImproveTheNews.org for this.
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.
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.
Lemmings are going to crucify me for this, but here goes anyway...
site:www.reddit.com
Fair. One day that recommendation will end up being a lemmy instance instead.
I mean, technically it should work if you use an instance that is federated with most other instances.
E.g.:
For some reason, it doesn't work for lemmy.ca, indexing may be disabled. So YMMV.
An idea would be if they allow the option to choose an instance of your choice and seach through there with just "lemmy"
Perfectly understandable imo. Reddit has been around for ages and has a huge backlog of information that users aggregated. Can't really expect Lemmy to match that after only (somewhat) taking off not that long ago. And i won't fault anyone for using this accumulated knowledge, i can't quite avoid it myself.
For me the big question is where people contribute new things. And considering how reddit is behaving, Lemmy/the Fediverse is the far better place to do so.
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.
4chan has proven surprisingly useful as of late. A hell of a lot more than reddit and Google.
I guess rule 7 (Anon is still able to deliver) applies here
I would give you lemmy gold for this comment if it existed...
Mostly Google-fu and a strong Spidey sense of links that look like they'll waste your time.
Type stuff into Google.
Scroll down until you find something that looks like a forum. Random PHPBB boards, Stack Overflow, Reddit, old Experts Exchange topics, etc. Or a wiki page.
If it isn't one of those two things, it's probably AI generated blogspam with a dozen adverts on it.
Google-fu is no longer valid
Yeah, it’s all been exploited by SEO. Search was always doomed to turn to shit. It’s an escalation game that never ends.
I remember when google originally broke into the search engine space because they gave results that were actually useful.
Given that is no longer the case, I wonder if the system is now ripe for another search engine competitor...that does what google used to do.
I think meta-search engines like searx are very good avoiding seo if configured correctly
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
I thought the same thing, but I've only ever searched about 700 things per month. With better search results, you end up searching less. $10 per month is a small price to pay for the restored sanity from a working search engine.
A huge part of it is psychological. Knowing that I have to pay per use would deter me from searching or make me decide every search if this is worth using Kagi for instead of Google. The mental cost would probably be more than the financial one.
That's understandable. They do have an unlimited option, but that is definitely in the pricey realm. I think it's $27 a month.
Kagi has an unlimited plan, it's just a bit more expensive. I can also vouch for them in that their search quality is quite a bit better, and being able to blacklist/prioritize sites is pretty great.
I could probably ask around to see if anybody wants to share an account. That's a thought.
This is the way. Kagi has been worth the price of admission.
I've tried it for a couple of days, but didn't work for me. I've switched to ddg and loving it so far. Much better results than Google. Even Bing works better at work where Edge is the default browser.
I was on ddg for a while too, but found myself switching to Google sometimes with the !g syntax.
I think it's becoming a lost art ... but basically, you need to go by reputation. Pick well known sites that you trust, compare what they say about the subject, don't even base your opinion on just one random blog article or tweet / reddit / lemmy post.
For some, Wikipedia is trustworthy since it (usually) cites its sources and has a pretty good track record, while for others it's not to be trusted, cause anyone can edit it. In the end it's up to you what you trust. Another example: The CDC (in the US) can be considered trustworthy for health information, being an official government agency, but many also don't trust it as it has become more politicised and so, biased. Again, you decide what to trust, and always consult at least two trusted sources, more is better.
For product reviews, I simply don't pay much attention to the star rating, but instead, read the actual reviews, and sort them chronologically so I read the most recent ones. Check that they are actually reviewing the product / service you think they are, as there are ways to get good reviews then "switch" the product listing (amazon) and other similar tricks. Check if it seems plausible, level-headed, or if it's just someone being angry, or likely fake. Like I said, it's an art, not a science. Sometimes, you have to actually buy the product / service and judge for yourself, then compare your experience with the reviews, and you'll learn to tell the truthful reviews from the fake or unreliable.
A tip regarding Wikipedia is to check the edit history if the last edit was made very recently since it could be spam that no one spotted yet.
Back in the day, Wikipedia was so neutral that they had people arguing how to write articles from a non-human POV. Yes, certain articles get political, but that is when the talk page arguments, counter-arguments, and linked ARBICOM evidence pages give you a good lesson on what people think are fact and opinion. I haven't been a editor for a while, is wikipedia not a hotbed of nerds who have to be in alignment with the facts regardless of what current political discourse says is right nowadays?
Academics have since acknowledged the impossibility of achieving this fantasy "unbiased" perspective.
This has been such an incredible change to Wikipedia's work, allowing dedicated spaces to talking about rhetoric and talking points for readers to learn.
Yeah, more or less. We are always free to check the sources, which is also a part of what Wikipedia nerds debate - what is the best resource to link to for those who need more info?
Again with this. Wikipedia can't be neutral. Nothing can be. Neutral doesn't exist.
There is absolutely no way to be "politically unbiased" when talking about things. Being "neutral" just means being in favor of the status quo, which is not neutral at all. There is no third position, you either oppose or support the way things work right now. Bias is completely inescapable.
If you want to get an "unbiased" view of something, the only real thing you can do is to read many sources biased against both outlooks and compare and contrast. What you end up with will still be biased though, just by virtue of what you select to care about and not.
People who claim to be neutral and unbiased only say it because they think it makes them look more credible, or they have deluded themselves to be able to think they're somehow more rational than everyone else. There is no way to not be biased as a human being.
A good chunk of Wikipedia content is minor sports teams, players, towns with sub-1000 population, and minor highways that connect them. I'm not sure how you can be "politically biased" when describing "Alberta Highway 564 which runs mostly west-east from the east Calgary boundary".
Alignment with the facts? Depends. https://quillette.com/2022/07/18/cognitive-distortions/
What I'm getting from that is:
(1) Wikipedias editors don't want to use racists as sources for articles.
(2) The author thinks refusing to give equal time to fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence is a surrender to "woke ideology" that will kill Wikipedia in the long run.
Yawn.
"fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence" -- genes influence intelligence, that's the state of science.
I've always wondered how people who think the link between genes and intelligence is false explain the evolution of intelligence. I'm honestly shocked that people here in "Technology" give your comment so many upvotes. Shouldn't we be more sciency here? Also, AI is a good example that intelligence is not independent of the material world.
Your point (1) probably gets applause because of camp thinking. Don't let your beliefs become your identity. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxqTOm3TzsY
However, I understand that the topic is extremely uncomfortable and personally even think it should be avoided because society is not ready for it. There is still too much racism and hatred existing in society for this knowledge not to be abused. The same social immaturity also explains why currently many suspect this research to be motivated by racism.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=NxqTOm3TzsY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
If you feel something doesn't align with facts, there is a whole multi-level system. Check the talk page to see if the page isn't part of some sanctioned case. Make a referenced change. If it is revered, bring it up on the talk page. Seek consensus. If there is a coordinated group of people reverting you, then bring your case to Request for Comment (RfC). If you are following the rules and being civil, others will come to your aid through the RfC process. If it breaks out into an edit war, the thing will go to the Arbicom and those that were civil will "win", e.g. the people not being civil will be banned.
Well that was interesting. Useful to know I cant rely on Wikipedia any more for anything on human intelligence.
With anything controversial like this its best to go direct to the source if possible - the research itself
I mean Wikipedia is not without a shitload of bias. Try searching democracy in China or homelessness in the USSR.
Take the contrast between the pages democracy in China vs democracy in the US. The Chinese page uses shit like oxford and Cambridge to call China an authoritarian one party state. Which: okay, but the framing of this is incredibly negative given the same argument could be for the US. Notably, the US page (redirected from democracy in the US) simply outlines US government structure and function.
The Chinese page condemns the current government of China as being antidemocratic while unironically citing the government that lost the civil war to the Chinese communist party instituted martial law for 38 years in Taiwan. Yes, the current Chinese government does not allow other parties to run candidates (as far as I understand it) but given what the people experienced before this government, its not that shocking that the vast majority of the population believes they live in a democracy.
Long windedly, Wikipedia is also super biased and corrupt.
Wow are you saying Wikipedia is biased and corrup because they didn't inaccurately call the U.S. a one-party Authoritarian state?
The "Democracy in China" page explicitly states at the top that i's going to be an overview of political concepts and that there is on-going debate.
Homelessness in Russia does have a section on Soviet Union, talking about "Densification" following the October Revolution ie. Forced re-housing into small state owned flats.
Criticism of the US is indeed found directly in the same paragraph about how our government works:
Open your eyes, Wikipedia is showing how it can be an incredibly dense and informative resource.
The debate is from western scholars and from a western perspective.
If you are going to call communist party control of elections authoritarian and undemocratic, then two capitalist parties controlling all elections in the US isn't really functionally different. I'm not a China Stan. My point is that even trying to research how Chinese government and politics function using Wikipedia is exposing one to western propaganda.
Also, I think it should be fairly obvious that the western state and intelligence wings clearly are influential on Wikipedia.
Calling the CCP Authoritarian and Undemocratic / Illiberal is accurate. They disappear those who protest or object.
Having a two party, first past the post, electoral college system in the US is less democratic than other Liberal Democracies. And wikipedia has links acknowledging that.
Researching China is always going to be exposing oneself to Western Propoganda. Why? Because Chinese Propoganda is the direct source we have to go by. We are unsure 100% how it works, and must try to read China state actions, and makr educated guesses - because of China's obfuscation of the truth.
The thing is most of the people who say they're making educated guesses are actually just being deliberately dishonest to plant dislike for a geopolitical rival in the population. And obviously Chinese state media is being dishonest too. You don't have to pick one over the other.
One of the longest running ARBICOM cases is about Tawain. The first one ended, and then another one pops up literally on naming conventions of geography in Tawain. It is like a unmovable obstacle vs. an unmovable obstacle with endless chineese editors vs. endless wikipedia burocracy.
I would hate to see what the mandarin version of Wikipedia has to put up with.
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.
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.
It sucks that the owner is a shitbag
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.
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
You’re asking about a pretty tough problem, and I don’t have the silver bullet for that one. However, I do have some tools that might help you out a bit. None of these tools are 100% reliable, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Fakespot and reviewmeta can help weeding out some of the junk reviews.
When I have a lot of text to go through, I just dump all of it on chatGPT or Bing and ask for a summary. It’s a language model after all, so it should be pretty good at this sort of thing. A horse won’t plow a field all by itself, but if you’re there to steer it, it will get the job done faster than you would.
When I’m looking for a good book to read, I’ll usually use the reviews of goodreads. Just skip all the 5-star reviews, because they are usually written by people who aren’t competent at reviewing books. Take all the the 1-4 star reviews dump them on your favorite LLM and let it look for frequently reoccurring complaints.
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.
There's an interesting blog post on this subject (likely someone posted it already): https://dkb.blog/p/google-search-is-dying
I find it to be very agreeable. Search is dying and I don't agree that appending "site:reddit.com" is any kind of permanent solution, just a workaround that will also break.
It's already breaking.
Some stuff just links to deleted comments
Newer stuff is just crap since a lot of knowledge has left the site
Through Cunningham's Law.
I let people smarter than me on Lemmy and in chat rooms tell me wtf is going on in ways I can understand. If I need that info for a paper, I can always just say something stupid and get like 50 people correcting me with accurate info and sources. 🤷🏻♂️
Wiki
On programming topics, your top search results will be stack overflow followed github followed by sites that scrape stack overflow and then the sites that scrape github. It's great.
Ayo how do I automatically remove those scrapers from search results? I know I could manually exclude them all in the query, but that's tedious
Free ublacklist extension and list you can find on Github or Gitlab with updated scraping sites you can either "subscribe" the extension to or copy and paste manually in one go.
There are some good working add-ons for browsers that do that for you. our only need to manage the list and the add-ons do the rest.
I e.g. block all the crap shops...
With some experience in development you some day know the sites that have good content for specific topics but yeah its hard...
I follow some reviewers on YouTube, Project Farm is a great one.
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.
I've started doing the same, but instead I keep a "personal wiki" .docx -document. Updating that is less frustrating than realizing again and again that you can't find the thing you found a month earlier, using the same search terms, because of SEO optimization and other random bullshit thats apparently going on under the hood.
Have you looked into personal wikis like Tiddlywiki or Zim, by any chance? They may be a little better suited to the task than your .docx document.
Personally I've found for a local, offline only approach, Zim is rather nice & pretty easy to pick up. Nevertheless, if your method is working well for you, disregard this!
I havent, but I'll be sure to check them out if they could be usefull to me. Thanks for the tip!
Or create your own Zettelkasten using Logseq or Obsidian, it's a very cool thing.
Kinda glad that I kept most of my university textbooks and have a bunch of encyclopaedias and shit lying around.
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.
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 usually look for stuff on stackoverflow and stackexchange.
If i can't find it on those sites, i'll perform some arcane google magic (dorking) to see if i can find it.
If all else fails, i'll sniff through arxiv to see if i can find some research papers on the subject.
"Hey StackOverflow, what's the best window fan you can buy these days."
"Removed. Duplicate of "What's the best dryer?"
and "What's the best dryer?" was answered in 2010
And the last comment was 'nvm. Sorted it.'
Research journals along with a university based Library search engine to find them.
https://www.sci-hub.st/
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
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.
That's just consumption.
How do you research something?
I guess it's training. In german we have a word for it that translates to "media competence", something way not enough people have.
It contains several things (some already mentioned before):
It hardly depends on the topic you want to research and mostly depends on experience.
I think in English that term might be media literacy, but as you observe, it's not terribly common, which is frustrating given that it's been needed even prior to the internet's emergence.
Is "media literacy/competency" taught much in Germany, but perhaps not well? Either way, your advice is good even if it wasn't taught or taught well!
No unfortunately not. There are some movements that try to get it into the learning plan of schools but with not much success yet.
So right now parents have to teach their kinds, but many of them don't have any competence on their own, so no teaching happens on times were the negative movements learn (or already learned) to use this lack of knowledge to manipulate.
Phishing is one of the best examples.
I feel how I get frustrated while writing :D
Go digging? That hasn't really changed has it? If a report pops up in my feed speaking about some scientific study, I try and go to the journal or the arxiv to find the study itself so I can read the summaries. If I really can't find anything first party, if I've got some personal knowledge on the topic I might just write the paper's author and ask for a copy (they're often very willing and excited to share) or use my library provided JSTOR access?
Google scholar still mostly works as well.. but yeah I only use it every other week or so.
Like this isn't new, science twitter has mostly moved to mastadon so most of the time there's an arxiv link in the "Study released today..." toots etc.
There are some new youtubers trying to spread the word, but yeah like the same way you've always researched?
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 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/
https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2
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
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 would agree. And I love those videos with timestamps.
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?
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 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
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!
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.
As can be seen in some other replies here, and in some other threads, some have taken to using AI in the sense of ChatGPT to aid in finding/researching/summarizing info, hence my mention of it in my thread.
Appreciate the feedback btw, I was in a drier headspace with my questioning a couple days ago, so it does read more detached.
The problem with that is that you need to know enough about the subject to know when it's just making shit up to sound clever. If you don't, and you just believe everything it says, you're going to be teaching yourself bollocks.
Absolutely, that's why in my thread I was specifically asking how to go about researching online given search engine commercialization/"optimization" and AI "hallucinations".
In a funny twist, my question may have been better suited to this community, given its specificity, and OP's question may have been better suited to asklemmy with its more relaxed phrasing. In any event, it's been reassuring to see that others are muddling through similar problems lately and trying to rethink how we approach navigating the web.
Brave search seems marginally better than others.
It sucks for results in my language.
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.
I use Google, Yandex, Reddit, Lemmy, and Chat GPT
Scielo.org
Hacker News top links
There's a lot of competition and a big overload of data. That makes searching for stuff really hard. Don't know the solution...
ChatGPT for general knowledge and programming questions. Mostly straight to the point answers without 500 word drivel and 6 ad blocks on a single page for a 3 line answer you find on most blogs...
Literally the worst source for anything…
It has no understanding, it just craps out things that look right, absolutely awful for code generation beyond boilerplate. (And I do pay for the better model. )
Eh, I found it quite useful in giving me relatively well known information. As for code, it's great at telling me what functions and such do without having to traverse the documentation for a library and such, and also explaining stuff I am confused about. It is faster and more convenient for a lot of stuff, as long as you double check important info (but you have to do that anyway, never use a single source etc etc).
Its more like its only as smart as the average person... Which isnt that high of a bar so yeah for anything even mildly specific its dogshit
It isn’t “smart”, it’s a language model.
You ain't smart >:(
But in an age where were considering fridges smart, I think a language model at least contends
I mean, it doesn’t even produce compilable code half the time. Even if you give it feedback about which error it produces, it might not fix it after 3-4 corrections. I’ve ended up in loops where it cycles through incorrect suggestions, apparently forgetting that all previous answers are incorrect.
Hey all I gotta say is do you think 50% of people can properly code? Cause otherwise it should be ass at it.
But ask people to write the general structure code might take, and it does give you some boilerplate (but again might also be ass)
I wonder whether ChatGPT can evaluate trustworthiness on the fly. A lot of the complexity of modern search engines is to try to prevent gaming the system. Maybe an AI heuristic would be less predictable/gamable
I haven't used this yet but Brave search Goggles feature let's you set filters on your searches.
I'm just trying asking multiple people who seem to be knowledgeable on the topic to see if I can get people to volunteer their recommendations.
Really depends on the subject, but for anything programming:
GeeksForGeeks and similar sites are the bane of my existence. Any time I try to find docs, I have to wade through pages of that junk
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 have researchers and journal rss's on feedly
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
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.
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 dont
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..
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 others believing it, 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 those who fund them benefiting if the public and politicians believe those "studies").
In summary, do it whilst being aware 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 started paying for a search engine called Kagi. Google and the other free search engines are completely fucking worthless these days.
When a topic is hard to find, I use Perplexity.ai
The AI is pretty good at summarizing,and giving you multiple links with the reason why it is relevant.
But it is pretty slow, so only good if regular searches don't find what you are looking for.
Just use a chatbot, it works like a charm. I personally use bing chat's api to get good information.