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 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.
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Yes, I’m aware of that.
But I have a list of sites I’ve been collecting that I don’t want to show up, and I don’t feel like manually adding them to all my searches.
Also, I use my SearXNG instance on my phone as well, so I don’t need to type all those rules manually on a phone keyboard.