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?

  • BigVault@kbin.social
    13·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Kallioapina@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • ALostInquirer@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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!

        • Kallioapina@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I havent, but I’ll be sure to check them out if they could be usefull to me. Thanks for the tip!